From all angles

Never are angles more important, more game-changing, more defining, than when walking around the city of Valparaiso. Each time I walk the same street in Cerro Alegre or Cerro Concepcion from a different direction, or even from the same direction but looking a different way, I see it from a new angle, in a new light, and a whole new world is revealed. A different mural on a huge wall, a tiny corner painted with a happy surprise, a secret staircase, a sea view, a perfect mix and mesh of bright colors.

There are times, too, where I’ll find myself in what I believe to be a foreign place, a new and as yet undiscovered (by me) place, only to turn slightly and realize I’ve totally been here before, more than once. In fact, it’s very familiar - I’m just now seeing it from a different angle.

And what is this experience if not a fantastic metaphor for life. I think I will put some intention towards seeing things from different angles for the next few weeks to see how it changes my world, my restlessness, my need to constantly move. If I can’t move, or don’t move, but make use of my angle vision, shouldn’t I be fulfilled in the same way?

Let’s take the Salar de Uyuni, in Bolivia. I had the wonderful opportunity to travel there on a 4 day tour recently. Though initially hesitant to make the trip because of the $160 entry Visa for Americans, I learned that that requirement dropped just over a month ago - talk about a new angle. This was the permission from the travel gods that I needed to take the trip.

The Chilean-Bolivian border is the first study in stark angles - could 2 countries handle the same basic function in a more different way? Leaving Chile, we must wait in the van for an hour as, car by car, tourists are shuffled through the small office, then allowed to be the banos they’d had their eye on. The waiting feels extreme, the ping pong table next to the customs bag-search table makes us feel like we are on candid camera, but at least it feels organized. Entering Bolivia is a different story. Still about 32 degrees, we are made to wait in line, outside this time, for 45 minutes while the disinterested immigration officials slowly work their way through the line, randomly asking people to step into their shack where their laundry hangs. They are in a tiny cement shack with a leaking roof, a stone’s throw from a newer and more modern-looking building that is inexplicably out of use. There’s no bathroom, here - you can use the “Inca toilet”, they say. That’s code for outside, which would be fine if there weren’t ‘no urinario’ signs painted on all the buildings or other privacy-providing structures. If only I could pee at the same angle as a man!

My 5am visit to the largest salt flat in the world was the highlight - the sunrise was epic as it seeped slowly over the crystallized salty earth - the salt is 15-20cm thick in any one place, and the water beneath it evaporates through leaving, a beehive of hexagonal patterns that’s hard to capture in photos. My shadow went from nonexistent to twin-sized to five times my length in a matter of minutes - the sun is a true master of angles.

The numerous lagunas were another high point, varying in color depending on the contents: white means borax, green means copper and arsenic, red means plankton for the hundreds and hundreds of flamingos paying a visit, grazing alongside llamas and vicunas. On one hand, these lagunas seem plentiful enough - they have conveniently aligned themselves in a perfect candy necklace for we tourists to follow along and nibble pleasurable at easy intervals, to break up the washboard roller coaster that is our Land Cruiser ride through the desert.  From another angle, though, how many more would there be? How many more were there before the earth started to get hotter and hotter?

Our guide, Orlando, is a stoic dude with a baby face and a soft side to match. He bounces between music genres as the sun rises in the sky, my experience of the landscape morphing as the music does. We bop to “Zombie” by The Cranberries as the Dali desert stretches rock shadows into bizarre, creature-like shapes. Orlando croons to Latin Reggaeton as we race by drip castle cliffs. Andean flute tunes soundtrack the soft bounce of the 4x4 through greenish, scrubby wetlands wit a backdrop of erosion-shaped sandstone. Fittingly, a familiar American 80s pop hit announces our arrival at the railroad town that borders the acres and acres of flats stretching forever in all directions, a sight that totally eclipses my heart. A bizarrely fitting lyric asserts that “some things are better just passing through” as we pull into Quetena Chico, a dusty town where less than nothing seems to ever happen.

Orlando has been driving/guiding in and around the salt flats for at least 10 years. He’s from Uyuni, so has seen this area go through all kinds of changes: the cultivation of salt for Bolivian gain, the shift to internationally privatized ownership of the companies who do the cultivating, the same changes in the  Bolivian railroad industry, the rise of lithium as a primary export, the introduction and growth of tourism in southwestern Bolivia, the rise and fall of Evo Morales (generally revered in these parts as he’s indigenous, like the locals). 

I can only imagine (and not well) what it must be like for Orlando to know his country like this, from every angle, and to spend 90% of his days with tourists like me who only get to see it from one. He wouldn’t be wrong if he felt that the brand of “adventure tourism” that fills his wallet is just as blindly opportunistic and ultimately destructive as the salt and lithium trades: we foreigners come, we interact at a surface level, we get what we want/need, we stick to our angle, and we leave. We profit, whether from photos, Instabragging or even financially through blogs and documentaries, and we share none of that with the subjects we left back in the flats. The ones who led us in experiencing it in the first place. It doesn’t even cross our mind. We don’t see it from that angle.

But what if we did? What if we went into every new experience, every country, every city, every home asking what our money, our presence, our politics, could do for it, instead of the other way around? What if we adopted a new angle?