In the cubicle and dreaming... Uyuni Salt Flats

I’m still in the cubicle with nothing to do… it’s Thursday, so I still have one more day to go after this one ends, and even more depressing than that, I still have more than a month to go. The sandwich guy is walking by as I type. He’s this random dude who sells sandwiches in the break room and he walks through the office every morning at this time calling out: Good Morning! Happy Thursday! ‘How does he know?’ I grump to myself. At least I know when he walks through that means only a half an hour until lunch. I sit back in my chair and stare at the royal blue screen of the Semtek program. Its color reminds me of perhaps the most vivid blue I’ve ever seen: the color of the water on the salt flats of Bolivia during rainy season…

I woke up that morning around 5:30am, which was no insignificant feat, considering I had gone to bed only a few hours earlier. I opened the clapboard door to structure Claire and I had stayed in and saw gray tendrils on the horizon.

“Shit,” I said to Claire. “We need to get going. Up and at ‘em.” I only heard a grumbled response, but I knew she’d be right behind me.

As hard as it was to get myself up, it paled in comparison to the task of rousing the group as well as the 4x4 drivers. The night before we had been up way too late obliterating bottle after bottle of cheap rum and cheaper beer. I particularly remember Neil and Tom’s impassioned renditions of Bohemian Rhapsody, Fat-Bottom Girls and other Queen favorites. Either one of those guys is hilarious when they’re on their own and sober, but get them together with a bottle of rum and you’ll literally be crying-laughing for hours.

Unfortunately, by 5:45am on a frigid morning all the hilarity had seeped away with the last drop of rum. I stumbled across the rocky driveway towards the main building. We had spent the night in the foothills on the shore of salt flats. The site was accurately called a refuge; cob buildings with aluminum roofs, no heating and electricity that only worked for a few hours every evening. I paused for a moment to admire the slowly fading, but still stunning nightscape. At over 10,000 feet there is much less atmosphere obscuring the sky than where sane people normally live and at that moment we were probably sixty kilometers from the nearest electricity so there was no light pollution to obscure the crystal clear canvas. The black blanket of night, gaudy with twinkling stars, draped all the way down to the straight-line horizon. The smear of the Milky Way was directly overhead. The sky was so perfect, it looked like a replica, as if God had woke up in middle of the night and thought to herself, ‘You know what? I’m going to bedazzle that shit.’

As I tromped into the main building, I decided to start with the drivers. Though they didn’t always agree with me, they at least had some obligation to do what I told them so I figured they’d be easier to get moving than my hungover group. I knocked on the door to their room and eventually I heard a shuffling behind the door. Finally it opened and one of the drivers, squinting in the light of my flashlight, said, “Si? Que es la problema?”

“There’s no problem,” I replied in Spanish, “but we need to get going. I want us to be on the flats for dawn.”

I’m sure after the late night, he went to sleep secure in the knowledge he’d have an extra couple hours in the morning as we slept off our hangovers and so over the next thirty seconds, it was interesting to watch the seven steps of depression start to play out on his face. Of course the first step was shock and dismay, which came when he realized this crazy gringo actually meant to make him get up at this ungodly hour. The next step pain and guilt (why did I ever agree to take this group?) came and then went quickly into anger and bargaining, which led to this exchange. “Amigo!” he half shouted. “We have lots of time before dawn.”

“Yes,” I replied, “but I want to be there for dawn, which means we need to get moving now.”

“I think if we wait one more hour it will be good, no?”

“Nope, now.” I said.

He hung his head as the next stage, depression, settled over him and I left him to work out the upturn, reconstruction and finally acceptance on his own.

The people in my group were not so easy to convince. Nobody had a real clear idea of why I wanted them up in the first place. They all had seen dawn before and had no real desire to see it that morning. I started cajoling, threatening and physically pulling people out of their beds. I told them it would be the best thing they saw during their whole four months in South America and if they missed it, they would regret it the rest of their lives. Of course, I had no idea if that was true. I had never been out on the flats for dawn and in fact never had heard of any other tours doing it either. However the rainy season in Uyuni only lasts a few weeks and in that time the normally bone dry, utterly flat landscape fills with about 2-10 inches of perfectly still water creating a mirror effect of ground and sky. Ever since I had missed it the year before because I was too lazy to go on the excursion (and I had already been on it several times before and had no reason to suspect it would be any different this time) I had promised myself I would not only go and see the water-filled salt flats, I would wake-up and see it a dawn! And since I wanted to see it, the group had to go too.

Finally after exhausting every trick in the book, I had everybody more or less up. The only person who I didn’t eventually get out of bed was Martin, who threatened physical violence against me and was one of the few people big and ornery enough to actually back it up. After a quick bite and use of the facilities (I seem to remember more than one person needing to regurgitate the fun from the night before) we piled into the 4x4s and drove out to the flats.

The fact was, the drivers were probably right. We could have waited another half hour or so to head out, but I was given some leeway because at least now everyone could see what I had been talking about. To our right it was dark, the brilliant stars still hung over the horizon, while to our left tendrils of pink were starting to invade the gray sky. Behind us rooster tails thrown high by our jeeps shattered the dark mountain outlines in the water’s reflection. We stopped about a half-mile into the flats and as the water settled around us to once again paint a perfect likeness of the sky above, we climbed on top of the 4x4s to watch the show.

It was bitterly cold and the smart people were bundled up in coats, thick sweatshirts and long pants. I on the other hand, had thought that maybe I would want to walk around in the water a little, so had dressed in my Evergreen State hoodie, shorts and havianas. That way I wouldn’t ruin my one pair of shoes. Shivering, we sat on the luggage racks, watching the glow slowly creep over the edge of the world. As it grew lighter, mountains appeared on the horizon along with low-lying clouds, but because of the reflection it was hard to tell which was which.

I wanted to get down and take a picture of the group huddled on the tops of the jeeps, but I was freezing and I wasn’t looking forward to walking around basically barefoot in the icy water. It was still pre-dawn and the color in the water was glorious. When I looked straight down, the water was a deep luxurious blue, but as my gaze lifted blue slowly faded to gray, before orange took over and gradually became deeper until the burnt sienna of the horizon. Then as my gaze continued up above the horizon the process reversed itself.

Finally, I couldn’t put it off any longer. It’s rare that you can capture the true beauty of a dawn or a sunset and often the better picture is what’s behind you, bathed in that beautiful soft light. So with that in mind and my camera in my pocket, I eased down into the cold water. Though the water only came up to my ankles it was still a shock just how cold it was. Immediately my toes were chilled to the bone. Close up, the water appeared milky with saline and I could feel the salty grit sloshing under my feet and between my toes. Walking in flops proved to be problematic as they kept suctioning to the ground underneath the surface, but taking them off was even worse because walking on the crystallized saline felt like walking on serrated knives. Eventually, keeping the havis on, I learned to walk on my tiptoes and made my way out into the water, leaving a little bubble trail behind me.

I walked out about twenty feet and stopped. My feet were so cold that I just wanted to get it over with. As I turned, perfect concentric ripples grew around me, slowly running towards the dawn, the dark, the mountains, the jeeps and everything else. Now that I was out there, I immediately knew that the shot wasn’t going to be as cool as I hoped. It was all right, everyone huddled together on reflecting jeeps in the pink light, but the real show was behind me. I snapped a couple of pictures and then went around to the other side and snapped a few so that the jeeps were shadows in front of the dawn, but nothing came out that great (and anyway all those pictures were lost along with every picture I took in S.A. when my computer and external hard drive was stolen two days before I came home… it was tragic and I don’t want to talk about it).

I climbed back up on the jeep and tried to swipe the layer of salt off my calves and ankles, while trying in vain to warm my feet. As is the case with almost any sunrise, the sun breaking over the horizon was anti-climatic after the spectacular pre-dawn. Still, we waited another hour or so before finally climbing back into the jeeps and moving on. I didn’t realize that people had been taking pictures of me when I was out trying to take ones of them, until later when I was looking through Michael Rimmer’s camera. Even on the small viewfinder of his camera, I could tell it was the most amazing picture that had ever been taken of me. It’s the one that hangs in my room today and the one that’s on the opening page of my blog. There were others taken while I was out in the water, but some how he framed it just perfectly. Every time I see that picture I’m immediately transported to that perfect moment in time.

Driving out into the middle of the flats in the daylight the water so perfectly replicated the blue sky and puffy white clouds that it felt like we were floating. We stopped and took a group picture, careful not to disrupt the water and the reflection was so distinct that you can pick each person out…



My phone rings and I am startled out of my reverie. “This is Mike,” I say, fumbling to get my headset on.

“Mike,” a voice says in my ear, “it’s Vickie from Harrisburg?”

“Thanks. Go ahead and put her through.” I wait for the line to change over. “Vickie, hi!” I say with enthusiasm that I don’t feel. “We’ve added a date in your area this fall, so I wanted to know if the Berkshire I is available…”

It’s Thursday… only one more day to go until the weekend.

In the cubicle and dreaming...

Right now I am sitting in a gray four by eight foot cubicle. I am surrounded on three sides by tables on which there are a variety of pens, pencils and highlighters. There’s a stapler, a masking tape unit with no masking tape and a yellow notepad. In the corner lies a large broken calculator with a big spool of accounting paper and an off-white surface that has yellowed over the decades to a shade best described as nicotine. The computer I’m typing on now is a Dell from the mid-nineties, which thankfully has been updated to include Microsoft Office 2000 (for future generations reading this account, the year is 2010). I have various file folders, papered in yellow sticky notes, sitting in stacks around my cubicle. I have a phone with a headset and strangely a boxy, black CD player that I don’t think works and even if it did, would be inappropriate in an office environment. I don’t know why it’s here. I have a coffee cup that I found in the break room. It’s purple and pink leopard print and has a caricature of an old woman in purple who is saying, “At my age I’ve seen it all, done it all, I just can’t remember it all.” It just happened to be the biggest cup I could find, but for some reason, people think it’s hilarious that I use it.

The dress code is formal. This means I need to come to work in a jacket and tie, though the jacket is strictly worn from the car to the closet in the hallway in the morning and draped over my arm as walk from the closet to my car in the afternoon. I’m not sure why it’s necessary. The women can pretty much wear whatever they want as long as it’s not jeans or flip-flops.

My job right now is to book meeting spaces and hotel rooms for seminars that will be put on by BER next year. I send the hotels an RFP (a request for proposal) by fax because when the program we use was made, the internet was still only being used by military. Once sales department in the hotel receives the fax, they send it back their proposal with all the pertinent info about their hotel. I then call them on the phone to confirm things and then finally enter it all into an ancient computer program named Semtek in the computer. There are a few more ins and outs, but it’s boring and you get the gist. The problem is that often I have a ton of down time while waiting for people to get back to me. For example, right now I’m waiting on the Holiday Inn West in Winnipeg to fax me back their RFP and it’s last one for this round, so I have nothing else to do (which is why I’m writing this entry). I’ve been so bored the last couple of days that I’ve been asking other people if I could do their work, but they’re mostly in the same boat I am.

My cubicle walls are only about 4 feet tall, so bored co-workers will stop by, lean an elbow on the corner of my pen and chit-chat. I also have the pleasure of sharing my cubicle space with my department’s fax machine. So all day, people come in and out, picking up faxes. It’s awesome.
Last Friday we had “party” in the break room where we celebrated all the May birthdays and anniversaries. Those who had anniversaries received certificates commemorating their valuable and loyal years of service to BER. There was a woman who was celebrating her tenth year, so she received a plaque. She seemed pretty happy about it, but I wonder what she did with the plaque. Probably decorated her cubicle I guess, but I have no idea what people would do with a certificate.

I know for many people, what I’m describing is normal. I’m only here for another month and a half or so, but there are people here who do this every single workday, week after week. This is their life. And believe it or not, I’m not knocking it, after all many of them seem happy. Their lives have a certain reliability that I envy. Trust me, it’d be lovely if I owned a house right now, had a family, a dog, and a car that was newer than this computer. But sacrifices were made… and it was worth it damn it! Because though I’m sitting in this cubicle, every so often I can drift off and memories swirl around my confined space. Right now, I can hear the chants, “Si se puede! Si se puede!” The deafening roar of the crowd still rings in my ears and the bleachers still sway beneath my feet…

I was on my last tour in South America. Perhaps some of you remember it as I chronicled the first half of the tour almost every day (if you forget and are interested, you can find it below). Early on in the tour we stopped in Buenos Aires where the best soccer team in South America plays, the Boca Junior. As most of my tour was made of rabid British soccer fans, almost everybody was dying to go see them play. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any games at home in the four days were there, so everyone was left disappointed, including myself because I had never seen them either. However two months later when we were in Puno, Peru on the shores of Lake Titicaca, I heard some exciting news. Boca Junior was playing Club Cienciano, the local Cuzco team in the Copa de Libertadores (a South American tournament) the next evening. Though we knew the game wouldn’t be nearly as good as it would’ve been in Argentina since Boca Junior playing Cuzco is about like the New York Yankees playing the Toledo Mudhens, every one was still pretty fired up for it. So the following morning, we woke up early and headed out. The drive time from Puno to Cuzco is about eight hours and the game didn’t start until four, so we should have had plenty of time to get to the game, though secretly I was a little worried. This game was the biggest sporting event ever to happen in Cuzco and out of the thirty-two people on the truck, twenty-eight wanted to go. I couldn’t begin to imagine where I was going to come up with twenty-eight tickets on the day of the biggest sporting event in Cuzco’s history.

Throughout the day the truck was buzzing with anticipation. We had probably ten or eleven hard-core soccer fans on the truck and they couldn’t stop smiling. Since the beginning of the tour we had been to two soccer games, both of which had ended in 0-0 ties. That night’s game might be lopsided, but at least we were finally going to see some goals. About an hour outside of Cuzco, the beer started to flow as everybody started to get ready for the game, but just then a bump came from under the truck, a strange noise started coming from the engine and the truck slowly ground to a halt. I’ve never seen faces fall so fast. We all jumped out, hoping Steve could get it back on the road, but it the end it wasn’t happening. I used somebody’s cel phone to call my boss in Cuzco and have him send a bus out to pick us up.

By the time we finally reached the hotel, it was almost halftime and amazingly the score was still 0-0. As I checked us in, the boys dejectedly slumped into the lobby couches and turned on the game. The stadium was packed. “Well that’s it boys,” I heard one of them say, “we’ll never get into that.” “Yeah,” replied another, “anyway it’ll probably just be another nil-nil tie.”

Once we had checked in, I made no promises, but said that if anybody wants to still go down to the game, I would take them and do whatever I could to get them in. Amazingly, only four of them took me up on my offer. The rest of the group decided to go get a pizza down at the main square in the old town, Plaza de Armas. I remember asking, “Are you sure?” and a couple of them hesitating, but then declining. A decision they would soon come to regret.

So five of us piled into a taxi and flew down to the stadium. I believe it was Neil, Martin, Jacob, Dave and I. When we first got there, I wasn’t hopeful. It wasn’t just the stadium that was packed, it was the entire surrounding area, but amazingly I found two tickets right off the bat. It was easy to give them to Neil and Martin as they were two of the biggest football fans I had ever met, and now I was a little more confident that I’d find tickets for all of us. “Boletos! Boletos! Necesitamos boletos!” I cried as we slowly circled the stadium. Soon, I realized that I must have found the very last two tickets to the game, because we went all the way around the stadium and there wasn’t one ticket to be found. I realized I needed to switch tactics. We started circling the stadium once more, only this time rather than looking for tickets, I started looking for the people guarding the door. Surely we’ll find somebody who would look the other way for a few soles, I thought to myself. Amazingly, we didn’t. A couple times we found people who told us they could get us in, only to be stopped by somebody higher up. How was this possible? I wondered. This is South America. Everybody’s on the take.

We had made it around the stadium back to main entrance once again and now I was getting desperate. The second half was just about to start. As I argued with the guards at the door, I noticed an old man with a cane watching me (I swear I’m not making this up) and as I went from guard to guard, he followed.

Finally, I turned to him and asked him in Spanish, “Can I help you?”

“You want to go into the game?” he asked.

“Yes, we would,” I replied, suspiciously.

“Okay, you give me thirty soles each and I will get you into the game.”

“Wait,” I replied, “You want me to give you ninety soles up front and then you’ll get us into the game?”

“Yes,” he said with a nod.

I turned to Dave and Jacob. “All right guys, here’s the deal. This old dude says he can get us into the game, but it’ll require 90 soles up front and I have a feeling it’s just as likely that he’ll disappear into the stadium and we’ll never see him again.

“Ah fuck it,” Jacob drawled in his west-Aussie accent, “it’s only ten dollars, hey. Let’s give the old fella a chance.”

Dubiously, we forked over the money. The old man told us to wait by a door off to the side and then he hobbled into the stadium. As we sat there waiting for him, we heard a cheer rise up from the crowd as the second half began. I started spitting and swearing. “We never should’ve given that guys our money!” Just as I finished saying that, the door opened and the old man ushered us in with a smile. We walked past five or six guards pointedly looking away and went through another door into the concourse. We were in!

As we climbed the concrete steps covered in plastic beer cups and red streamers, the din of the crowd grew to a roar and as we crested the top of the stairs, we emerged into a sea of Cuzco red. A soccer game in South America is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It is sports passion unbridled. Restrictions are unheard of on what you can bring into a stadium in Peru. You want to arc toilet paper and red streamers down on to the field? Do it. You want to bring in homemade bottle rockets to shoot them off from beer cans? That’s encouraged. You’ve spent weeks making a 150 ft long and 50 ft wide flag that will completely cover one section of fans? Unfurl that bad boy! Just go ahead and cover up those people sitting in that section, they won’t care, they’ll love it! What? You happen to have road flares in the back of your truck that burn Cuzco red? Bring ‘em in! Show your passion! This was the atmosphere that we walked into. On top of which, there was at least 50,000 fans crammed into a stadium built for 42,000.

Obviously, we didn’t have tickets for a seat, but we found an awkward place to sit on a stairway, but just as we sat down, the impossible happened. Cuzco scored! It was a header into the corner of the net and the place erupted. If I thought it was nuts before, now it was pandemonium. Everybody was jumping up and down, hugging one another. We didn’t sit down for the rest of the game. As the second half progressed, I started learning some of the chants and songs, like “Upa Upa Upapa! El Cienciano es el papa!” I also thought to myself, man those guys who didn’t come must be kicking themselves right now. Later I learned that they had gone to the pizzeria overlooking the plaza, but couldn’t get any service because all the employees were watching the game. All they could do is watch on in horror.

Throughout the game, it was clear that Boca was the better team, but every time they had a scoring opportunity, they either missed or the goaltender made an amazing save. As time wore on, Boca missed shot after shot and electricity seemed to start flowing through the crowd. Then around the Seventy-fifth minute Cuzco scored again. Now the tension was too much to bear. Up until then, we thought a tie would be the best result possible, but could it be that they were going to win? The man next to me was wearing a dirty white polo shirt and a red nylon hat pulled down over his brow.

“What a game!” I said, giving him a nudge.

He didn’t answer, but just shook his head and it was several seconds before I realized tears were rolling down his face into his thick brush of a mustache.

With less than five minutes left, Cuzco scored a third goal, the pent-up tension released and the celebration began. Random people were hugging me, now almost everybody was crying and there was a jubilation I had never experienced at a sporting event. It was the kind of elation that only comes when a large group of people wants something so much, but it just seems impossible… but then it does happen. The only thing I can relate it to is the feeling I had when I was in a bar full of liberals and Obama was elected… and if you think I’m being melodramatic, then you don’t understand the passion of South American soccer fans.

The time ran out and it was official. David had slew Goliath and we had been there! The boys and I made our way out of the stadium and because we were about six inches taller than everybody else, immediately found a euphoric Neil and Martin. “I have never seen anything like it, mate,” Neil declared. A brass band appeared from nowhere and we joined the local Cuzceños, dancing with joy.

We walked down to the main street to find cabs to go home, the brass band music still ringing in our ears, but it was immediately obvious that it wasn’t happening. There was too long of a line, but it didn’t matter. We went and bought large 1.5 liter bottles of beer and started on the twenty-minute walk back to the hotel next to Plaza de Armas. As we walked, we happily recounted the game and told stories about other events that had paled in comparison. When we turned up the wide Avenida del Sol, the main street leading up into the old town, we noticed the whole right side of the street was closed off, but I didn’t think too much about it. In South America eventually you find it’s far too time consuming to try and find an explanation for everything, so we just ambled up the middle of the four-lane road, happily swigging our cerveza. But then something weird happened; people started to line the street, slowly at first in one or twos, but soon there was a crowd, four, five or even six people deep. That’s when I realized I could still hear the brass band. It had been following us, and we turned to find that a whole parade had materialized on the avenue a couple of blocks behind us. People were carrying banners, playing instruments and dancing in the street. We waited for the parade to catch up to us and as we entered the Plaza del Armas, we found ourselves leading the triumphant parade from the stadium after the greatest sporting event of the city’s long history.

Meanwhile, and I can only infer what happened because I wasn’t there, the people from my tour who didn’t go to the game were finally eating their very average pizza that was cold in the middle. Even though they had a fine view of one of the most beautiful plazas in the Western Hemisphere, the mood at the table was decidedly depressed.

“Don’t worry mate,” I imagine Matt saying to Mike, “there’s no way they could’ve got in.”

“Yeah,” Mike replied, poking at his cold, rubbery pizza half-heartedly. “I still wish we could’ve been there.”

“Uh guys,” Grace said, pointing down into the plaza, where hundreds of fans had gathered. Around the corner of Avenida del Sol, came a brass band, ecstatic fans dancing around large red and white banners, and Neil, Martin, Dave, Jacob and I swinging our beers in time to the music, leading a parade of thousands into the square.

Matt peered down at the blissful grins etched on our faces. He shook his head and looked at Mike. “Bastards!” he swore under his breath

Suddenly, the music fades, the swirling colors vanish and I find myself back in my gray cubicle, staring at the royal blue screen of Semtek. I sigh… its only Tuesday.