A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. ~Lao Tzu

Yoshi, Jonas and I made one last trip together. Graham was still sick and decided to stay in Ollyantaytambo, so the three of us climbed quietly into the dolphin and Yoshi drove his last miles in the machine we had all come to know as home.

We stayed the night in the parking lot in Cuzco and visited Yoshi’s new room. The room was surrounded in windows – the entire vista of Cuzco was visible from his bedroom. Of course there was an Argentinean musician living there on the floor (whose “goodbye” party had been held three weeks prior under the threat of deportation) and the disarray of single men, but it was a beautiful room and I felt glad to leave Yoshi there to start a life. We said goodbye in the parking lot, crying, and watched Yoshi walk slowly away from the dolphin, his rice cooker under his arm. Yoshi had become our friend in the most natural way – by living with us 24 hours a day. We had come so far from that day at the coffee shop…We had dreamt something up together and by pooling our resources and ourselves, had made it be. The three of us had slept, eaten, cried and lived in the same 10 foot room for five months. I know Yoshi beats up enemies from Jr High in his sleep (while speaking loudly in Japanese), I know he is addicted to grape juice, I know he hates forced social situations, I know he always wanted to race cars and held one of the highest online racing scores, I know his last name, Asakura, means storage, I know he is a sucker for cats, I know he will eat anything he can pluck from the sea, cooked or raw, I know he is stubborn as hell in the quiet brick wall way of the Japanese, and I know he has a very kind heart. Not many people on this planet could have traveled with two personalities as intense as Jonas’ and mine….Not many people could have driven non-stop for 12,000 miles. Yoshi requires patience and interest to know. He does not give up his inner self easily,but when he deems you worthy to know him and opens, you will find a strong compassionate soul underneath his exterior. I will miss him greatly – the Dolphin was empty and hollow without him. For days I felt the lingering atoms of his presence and an ache in my heart.

After leaving Cuzco, the trip seemed to have come to a close. Our minds became focused on arrival and we started driving 10-12 hours a day. With Yoshi gone and the world cup rapidly arriving, we could only think about getting safely to Brazil. We did not realize that the most difficult country, Bolivia, was still ahead.

As we left Cuzco, we drove through the high plains which rest on top of the Andes. We reached over 14,000 feet and began to meet the very tops of the mountains. The fields were golden and green; we were alone with the land except for the Indians harvesting wheat and corn with overloaded donkeys. As the sun hit the fields of grain from behind us it seemed we were driving a golden path through the highest point of the heavens.

We reached Puno, on Lake Titicaca, rapidly and drove straight through. The temperature had dropped even more since Cuzco, at night reaching freezing; we awoke to ice on the windows and our breath materializing in the air. During the winter months it gets to 15 degrees below zero in this part of Peru. We did not complain – we were happy to drag out the down comforter after so many months of oppressive humidity in Central America and Ecuador. Lake Titicaca was an odd place which felt somehow deserted - It rests on a great high plain and has the feel of a large marshland. That night we slept surrounded by massive trucks once again…The truckers of Latin America have become more familiar to us than any other part of society. We awoke to loud diesel engines coughing poison into the dolphin at 6:30 am.

We passed the Bolivian border with ease and drove toward La Paz. The border was a grungy, depressing town with garbage strewn streets and a brown dust, with which we soon became quite familiar, covering everything. I sat as Jonas negotiated with the border officials and dealt with documentation, watching what Yoshi calls the “Latin American Free Trade Agreement.” Trucks full of goods arrive at the border town and unload their supplies onto small carts. Skinny men pull the carts, overloaded with beer or fruit or rice, across the border. People wander back and forth across the border with ease – there is no fence and the armed guards ignore the massive chaotic clamor of poor moving to and fro across the boundary. Once the carts arrive across the border, they are loaded onto a waiting truck and driven away, tax free, into the night.

Jonas and I decided to visit Tiwanaku, the only Bolivian ruins (well, at least the only ancient ruins) open to tourists. We continued along the great empty plains, watching as the hours passed by with only the occasional desolate shack and heavily bundled Indian breaking the solitude. The Indians here have burned faces from the altitude, wind and harsh sun – sometimes they appear purple and scarred. The reality of their environment is reflected on their faces – the raw, grinding climate has eaten away at their bodies with the lack of compassion that is common to all great, empty natural places. They huddle against the wind, pulling donkeys through barely arable fields and walking patiently for miles alongside the road. In Bolivia it seems that the earth dictates; humans are allowed to scratch out the only bare minimum of a life. The color of the earth, the old dusty brown of millennia of erosion, coats everything. It seemed my eyes could not escape the earth – the faces, houses, roads, fields, animals and vehicles had all been made of this desolate dirt. The earth had come and swallowed life, coloring it with its geology.

Compared to the great ruins of Mexico and Peru, Tiwanaku was unremarkable. It sat in the midst of the great plains with an eerie, dusty silence. Apparently there is a great pyramid buried under a large mound of dirt, but like everything else, it had been swallowed by the plains. The earth was loath to give up its prize and excavation had been slow and tedious. Only small portions of the pyramid could be seen. Many of the walls of the site had been rebuilt, but it was unclear if they were in the original formation. The oddest piece of the site was a series of carved stone faces, now placed in the walls of what might have been a room. According to a few European scholars with strong imaginations, these faces represent the multiple races of the world. They also claim that a few of the oval heads represent extraterrestrial beings. Granted, the faces bear strange resemblance to the white, bug-eyed, pointy-chin aliens we have come to adore, and some bear the beards and noses of the white race, but it is difficult to judge the goal of the worn, primitive representations. We wandered through the ruins in the freezing wind, accompanied only by school children on field trips to the ruins. The small hills around the ruins rang with an eternal silence; the ruins felt more abandoned and forgotten than anything else I had seen. Life here had been swept away with the unforgiving, whipping winds and it seemed impossible to reconstruct what might have been. The earth wanted this site left to decay and erosion…the mysteries underneath it had been devoured with time. We watched the excavation workers chase a grey rabbit unsuccessfully through the ruins in the hopes of a nice dinner; the rabbit disappeared into the high grasses of the plain with a couple quick bounces and the workers returned to their seats atop the carved rocks of their ancestors. With Yoshi gone and the trip ending, this immense silent place felt appropriate. It seemed to be a place of mourning, a place to sit and think of that which has disappeared into the dust. It began to rain and we walked slowly back to the dolphin.

Tags: Bolivia, Ruins, South America

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 11:14 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.