Team Reetz

It’s 2ish a.m. and I am in a 70s-tastic karaoke bar in Santa Cruz watching my new friend, Carlos the American Airlines steward, belt out R.E.M. The man in the video has chest hair so thick you could hide Hot Wheels in it, possibly a lucky troll pencil topper. 3 hours before, I welcomed Carolyn and Nichole to Bolivia, attentively waiting right in front of the arrivals door sandwiched between some bonneted Mennonite women. I’ve waited for this for over half a year (the visit, not the Mennonite sandwich), and it does not disappoint.

The next day, we are in the Biocentro Güembe, a butterfly reserve encased in a little bubble of well-tended tropical greenery, luxurious pools and waterfalls, and the ubiquitous but prettier-than-usual boys from Israel. It always feels like vacation in Santa Cruz; chic restaurants, expensive wine, wearing sundresses in humidity that stifles any movement other than drinking beer by the pool.

We continue on to my anxiously-planned Tour de Sucre. Sucre graciously humors me with the impossibly blue, blue skies and dazzling sunshine I had hoped to present the White City in. Saturday is Día de los Niños y Niñas so we go to the party at my orphanage. I am “madrina” of the cake, which involves balancing a drum-sized cake on my knees while at the mercy of the driving of a Bolivian taxista. Absolutely terrifying. Bolivians always march around carrying entire cakes from the market on a skinny piece of styrofoam. They make it look so easy. We use Toñito Tours for our Salar de Uyuni trip, a private jeep for our group of 5½ (Elliot counts as 1½) and we customize the tour route. Bolivia is a consistent if not gracious hostess; she dishes out some gnarly GI infection to both Carolyn and Nichole within a day of starting the tour. It isn’t the most pampered place to be sick, but the Salar de Uyuni and southwest circuit of the Eduardo Avaroa Reserve is one of the most amazing places I have ever been. Mineral lagoons tinted blood red, slate, or teal and sprinkled with pale pink flocks of flamingos, geyser fields, luminescent deserts crowned with bizarre rock structures, and sunrise on the world’s largest salt flat. The legends explain it as a dried sea of tears shed by the Mother Mountain, after her love child with another mountain is stolen by her jealous lover.

It is blinding and immense, not soft like the snow it appears to be, and etched into an eccentric patchwork quilt by the ridges left behind by water that rises to the surface. It doesn’t crumble easily; there are no footprints. The salt burns my chin where I’ve been resting my head on the ground to take perspective pictures of us popping out of wine bottles and hugging giant iPods. The trip ends in the train graveyard, an unlikely (read: only in Bolivia) tourist attraction of silent giants, after 3 days of car games and an unhealthy number of lollipops.

FUN FACT / QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Is there a Ritz in Bolivia?" “Ahahaha!…black people.” “Ok, but God made Israel for me.” “Hostile colon!” “Your Mom´s from Chile.”