Soy Extranjero. #7

I`m on this road. And occasionally I write stuff and send it to you. But it`s not like I can control where the road takes me. Each day I bring my brightest hope and joy to the trail, but in this life we’re forever at the mercy…

Sooooo, unfortunately this posting is going to take a decisive turn towards the un-fun. There’s nothing I can do about that: it’s just what the road delt me.

But preface to the end: i’m alive and well in La Paz, Bolivia: which is an extremely beautiful city. Explaining how I got to La Paz, however, going to take some serious verbiage. So be patient. OR you may skip this un-fun posting as the road gods are bound to deliver me something more fun (an anecdote about a cute furry animal, or the like) in the near future.

—un-fun begins————————————————————————
I arrived at the Bolivian border a little haggard. Altitude, distance, and frigid nights had taken their toll and I needed a rest from the bike. I had 2 days until my birthday and wanted to be someplace rad. I took the train to Uyuni: a geological wonderland and home of the worlds largest salt flats. The Salar de Uyuni is gleaming white and so huge in many places you cannot see the other side. This lack of a horizon enables perspective-trick photography (making objects look bigger or smaller). My birthday goal was to get a picture of me doing a handstand on the tip of my toothbrush. Simple enough. At the hotel in Uyuni, I met 4 Israelis and told them my scheme. One of them (Nir) shared my birthday and another (Anat) was the following day. We joined forces. Working the “3 birthdays” angle we secured a solid discount (and promise of a birthday cake) on a 3-day Salar tour the following day, the 28th.

That day we gathered snacks and supplies. It´s best to leave nothing to chance when traveling the jankfest that is southern Bolivia. Don’t count on your guide to keep you warm or fed and always carry a few extra days supplies for when the truck breaks down. We pooled resources and eliminated worst-cases. That night the 5 of us went out to celebrate mine and Nir’s birthdays.

The member of the Israeli crew I most clicked with was “Shalom”. He was a huge hairy wookie with solid english and spanish and a gentle-giant kind of thing working. Swilling $1 Bolivian brews, we ate pizza and played cards into the night.

Bolivian hotels are famously basic. They cut corners on things like toilet paper (they charge for that) and even in frigid Uyuni, there’s no indoor heating. To compound the insult, at 10pm they shut off the gas and there’s no hot water. At 9:45pm I remembered this fact and (wanting a good hair day for toothbrush handstanding) ran back and took a shower. Squeaky clean, I returned to the bar, ordered another, and at 11:45 the 5 of us went back to the hotel and went to sleep. (Wearing stocking caps and all the cloths we had; under a mountain of blankets in frozen rooms)

I awoke at 8:30am to the sound of screaming inside the hotel. One or 2 screams would mean “cold morning shower”, but on the fourth scream I resigned this was something I was going to have to deal with. I jumped out of bed. Thinking the hotel was being robbed; I grabbed a rusty knife (my room was above the kitchen) and pursued down the hall.

I found Shalom holding the head of a girl I did not know, she was flat on the ground. He was barking commands over his shoulder to Nir, who was holding the head of a second girl and doing CPR (both courtesy of the Israeli army; Nir was actually a medic). I ran back down the hall to the balcony above the street and screamed “Taxi!!! Ambulencia!!!” several times. I ran back to Shalom and suggested we move the girls to the street and continue CPR there. We picked up the girls and carried them to the street. When I lifted the neck and shoulders of the first girl I found she was stiff as a board. There was mucus around the mouths of both girls and their eyes were sunken in. When we got to the the street, a pathfinder SUV was waiting. I rode in the backseat with the first girl, their two traveling companions (whom I also did not know) were in the front, and Shalom in the back with the second girl. When we got to the hospital I carried her stiff body into the ER. When I crossed the threshold I screamed down the hall so the ER workers would be perfectly clear on the gravity of the situation I was bringing them. I laid her on a gurney, and went to the door and yelled down the hall again as sleepy-eyed nurses and doctors filled the room. I stepped outside and as the doors closed behind us all 4 of us (Me, Shalom, and the girl´s two friends) fell violently ill in the hallway.

The girls began punching numbers and weeping french-canadian into cellphones. I sat near the ER door in total shock. When the first body emerged covered I could tell by the feet it was the girl I had carried. I somehow thought Shalom`s girl fared better but 10 minutes later she too was carted to the morgue. I went to the street and sulked next to Shalom and the two girls still sobbing into cellphones. The orange morning sun was thawing crisp air and cold pavement. Schoolchildren gawked at us from a nearby yard.

Without shoes, I hailed a cab back to the hotel and found the others huddled on the curb. They told me that the room had wreaked of gas and that was what killed the girls. I fetched my shoes and went to the tour company to cancel our 3-day adventure. When I told the guide ´two girls died in our hotel´ she said “ahhhh, gas” without asking. The tourist book didn´t mention it, but I guess gas heaters are a regular hazard in these parts. I went back to the hotel and found Shalom convincing the hotel management to let him fish the girls room for ID. When we entered the room the smell of raw gas and death was horrific. We rummaged through their all-too-familiar backpacker gear. For the first time I saw a heater in a Bolivian hotel room: a wall-mount with a crude knob on top, not a portable. Shalom left with two wallets and told me to get photocopies of the passports when the cops came and located them.

I watched the crackerjack-cop-show sloppily process the scene. They took a statement from the hotel owner who said he’d instructed the girls not to run the heater more than an hour and that he shuts the gas main off at 10pm (recall: cold showers). I was the only foreigner present for this part. Clutching photocopies of the dead girls passports, I went looking for Shalom. May and November 1985; they were 22 and 23.

When I caught up with Shalom and the girls I got the full story. The friends, Chantale and Geneviere, were med students doing a program in Sucre. Christelle and Anne were friends from Quebec University, doing a similar program in Cordoba, Argentina. The University had arranged for the four of them to do a three-day tour in Uyani, two weeks before their program ended. The rendezvous point was the hotel. Chantale and Geneviere checked in at 1:30am and were told Christelle and Anne were asleep in their room. When they went to wake them up for the tour, they were dead.

I collected emails from everyone who was in the hotel that night. I pleaded that the tourist-dependent Bolivians were going to sweep this under the rug and it was up to us to raise awareness so other travelers would know the danger. I guess that mission just started. I could taste the salt blowing in the desert wind, but the Salar was out of reach. I couldn´t take another minute in Uyuni: I was on the next bus to La Paz. I wasn`t going to stand on my toothbrush after all. I wasn´t going to see the salt flats.

Leaving the comforts of home to feast on the unknown is a blessing. At every turn, I am broadened and humbled by my experiences. Experiences like meeting amazing people you never would have otherwise and seeing places you couldn´t imagine existed. Hopefully one`s experience does not include getting killed by the heater in the hotel your university booked. But as for me: I’m pushing on. I’m going forward with a blank slate ahead. I’m feasting on the unknown and accepting what the trail brings me as my path. I´m bringing positivity to the trail and god-willing, the road will return me some of that again soon.

–Lucas