Three months it took for Mark to convince me to travel. Three months of Buenos Aires lifestyle, luxurious and rich in taste, everything at our disposal. Mark wanted out, wanted to strap on the backpack and make our way north for the sights and sounds of South America. I wanted to wait and see if Seinfeld was going to be on in spanish.
But, he eventually won, and like usual, was right about these things. He pushes us on; onto the cramped buses, onto the hostels and cheap eats restaurants...onto the traveller´s trail. And this is where the experiences truly are. It was easy setting up a very similar lifestyle to the one I have always known in the states while in Buenos Aires. But here, living out of a backpack and drinking freeze dried coffee for dinner, this is where we are fortunate to find the moments that stick with you a lifetime. And by that, i mean herpes.
Like with life back home, here there are moments that raise their head above the crowded field of day to day, monotonous life. Only they are a bit more piqued and barbed. So different from what we have known all our lives, they cannot help but to be forever memorable. They have the quality of an entirely knew experience.
We made our way north to the top of Argentina, a great little town known as La Salta Linda (the beautiful Salta). We decompressed a bit, then rented a car with a swedish girl named Emma who was bit too smart for either of us, and way too smart for the both of us combined. But she put up with our sarcasm (ryan) and goofy laughs (mark) with rolled eyes and earplugs. An employee of the World Bank, Buenos Aires, we must have appeared to her like the personification of Dumb & Dumber, but dumber.
A question we hear a lot now that we are tumbling through the third world, and usually at the top of the list of inquiries from family and friends is, ´is it dangerous?´. In the past, it has been, sometimes in ways you don´t tell the people you love because, well, why the hell would we bring it up? My mom has trouble sleeping after seeing her kids drink a glass of wine. If i told her what really was at play out here, well, that would be the end of her.
On a few occasions, danger has occasionally flared in our directon. There have been a few times when we had to hunker down into a karate stance and unleashe a few airborne roundhouses to let a couple of ruffians know that El Flaco and El Blanco meant business. Once they spied our dexterity and whip fast mobility, the children usually gave up and headed back to playing marbles. It doesn´t hurt that as we travel north and the population grows more indiginous and therefore shorter in heighth and darker in complexion that one of us is a wiry 6'5¨ostrich of a man and the other is in posession of skin presently resembling 2% homoginized milk. More often than not, the locals prefer to give us a wide bearth. It has not been difficult to convince some that we are, as they had most likely guessed already, real life X-Men.
The most danger to slither up on us of late has involved a peach of a car we rented, a 4 door sedan made by the fine people of Renault, the french auto firm we all had assumed filed for Chapter 11 when heavy competition from the Yugo arrived in 1989. Now, traditionally, french car manufactureres are not know for producing cars that could fall under the moniker´s of 'reliable' or even 'driveable', and this bad boy sure lived up to it´s heritage. We drove along a dirt road for 120 miles that hugged a hillside at the base of a narrow ravine, bisected by a shallow river. We slid and bumped around the curves and didn´t touch pavement for 3 hours. We arrived in a 4 street town, accepted accomodations on cots in the back of someone´s home, quite close to the tool shed, and made off for some microwave pizza. The morning arrived with a clean glare and a crisp chill, somewhere a couple degrees south of zero. The untrustworthy Renault really showed it´s stripes when it refused to start for 45 minutes and the girl we traveled with decided the best solution was to begin to cry. Now, I knew better than that, it´s these situations where you really have to embrace your wit and keen intellect; to find the hidden answer. Mark made his way to the front of the car as i made my way to the rear. Mark decided it best to pour some near boiling water on the fuel line leading to the engine, thereby defrosting the gas that had congealed over night. Simultaneously, i decided the best course of action was
to methodically kick the shit out of the rear bumper and right side fender. With our combined efforts, the car started up in no time like a racehorse. An obvious nod to our tremendous teamwork. Although the girl didn´t stop crying. She was the one who put down her credit card for the now dented rental car.
We made it safe to the border where our travel partner bid us goodbye to return to work in B.A. At the Bolivian border, you have to walk across, so everyone disembarks from their bus or car or mule and saunters over a cramped bridge. Immigration was a bit odd in that there were four different offices and therefore i now have four different entry stamps into Bolivia, which is exactly three more than the amount of times i will be entering bolivia in my lifetime.
The big attraction in Southern Bolivia is the giant salt flats. The fossil-like remains of an enourmous salt lake that once covered this area somewhere between 100,000 and 200 years ago. The salt flats have the appearance of a flat snow drift and stretches on into infinity. All the guide books tell us that it is ¨Larger than the country of Israel¨. I guess that is really big.
Once we hit Bolivia, the weather turned on us considerably, and the mornings were all tinged with the appearance of frost. Unfortunately, the result of this is that Mark had decided to battle the cold by, and i´m not joking, wearing his double-bed size sleeping sheet as a scarf along with some oversized woman´s coco-chanel sunglasses. For some odd reason, I guess Mark believes that this years Southern Bolivian fall fashion trends lean towards looking like the sand people from the first 20 minutes of the original Star Wars.
We signed on with a tour company that gave us a guide and three more members so that the 6 of us filled out a Land Cruiser for the two day excursion onto the flats. A recurring theme of this trip, the other travellers were all Swedish and our age. Samuel was single, and the couple was Tessa and Anders. Like every Swede we have met, they were fun, very intelligent and relaxed. I had officially met my opposites.
Anders, rather than the salt flats, turned out to be the highlight of the trip. If Sweden was to ever produce a feature film remake of Scooby-Doo, Anders would not even have to audition for the role of Shaggy. He was quick to laugh, posessed an okay grasp of english and had oily blonde curls that poked out from under his military cap. Best of all, he had an obsession with anything to do with the southern United States; although he had never been to the southern United States. But if it had south in its name, he was interested. As with the majority of people we meet, Anders had trouble understanding my name and always used the one in closest proximity to it. Becasue of that, here is an example of the constant refrain that eminated from the back seat of the Land Cruiser as we passed mile after mile of arid flat land:

-¨So, Brian, tell me more about Texas.¨
-'Well Anders, Texas is known for it´s cowboys, it´s oil, it´s rednecks. It has cacti and there seem to be a lot of people who live there.'
-¨That sounds as if an amazing place Brian. Can you tell me more?¨

And this is where i was stuck. I´ve never been there and i only know the stereotypes that we get fed through the media...but i didn´t want to dissapoint so i just began to make stuff up.

-'Here´s an interesting fact Anders. Texas consumes over 7.8 millions gallons of barbecue sauce a year. And in fact, it is home to the world´s largest smurf doll and the t.v. show Dallas was actually a documentary.'
-¨You see! I knew it was crazy amazing place....... Brian, will you tell me about South Dakota¨

And that was how the 48 hours of salt flat was spent, feeding a nice sweedish guy with absolute lies about our hearlded south. He now knows that the O.K. Corrall is a chain of barbecue chicken restaurants and that Wyatt Earp was our first gold medalist swimmer .