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The Book (cont.)
A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES often begins by shifting your ass five feet. Mine had started by popping over to another of El Lobo's picnic tables, and now, three days later, I'd found myself out on Bolivia's southern altiplano, stuck in the rainy mining town of Oruru, my backpack and my Israeli companions missing in action. It was a simple question that got me in this trouble: "So where's the Book?" I'd asked around at El Lobo. The answer from two Israelis named Avi and Elad was equally simple: Follow us. Avi was 22, with long hair and a poncho. Elad, 24, was unshaven, with untamed dark curls. Both had
These veterans travel for a year or more, hitting the beach, climbing mountains, dropping out, hooking up, and blowing their minds—and then repeat chorus, month after month, all over the world. Places like Bolivia are perfect for this: exotic, dirt cheap, and full of people who've never heard of Ariel Sharon. Elad was three months into his trip, with nine to go, which he hoped to divide between Asia and Latin America. He'd read the Book even before his trip, starting with a volume kept in a bookstore in Tel Aviv. Since it was summer, he and Avi told me, many Israelis were heading south to the cooler climes of Patagonia, and they invited me to come along. When I asked where we were going, Avi pulled a crumpled scrap of paper from his jeans, smoothed it on the table, and slid it across. It was their list of Israeli places between here and Tierra del Fuego. The spots weren't just for Israelis, of course: The same network attracted a random assortment of Canadian climbers, German ethnospelunkers, and Swedes who'd worked on kibbutzes. For all of them, the route ran south to a hostel called Marith, on the outskirts of Uyuni, near the end of Bolivia's southern rail line. From there, the Book recommended crossing into Chile with Cristal, a tour agency that specializes in the Bolivian salt flats. In Chile, the main stops were the Hotel Indiana, a flophouse somewhere in Santiago, and Pucón, the adventure-sports capital of southern Chile, where there was a hostel previously owned by two Israeli expats named Edi and Shay, and therefore called "the place that used to be Edi and Shay's." In Argentina, we could find a place in the swish alpine town of Bariloche called Room 1040. Or was it Apartment 4010?
Though we knew where we wanted to go, getting there was something else. The trip south from La Paz was a disaster. I loaded my backpack on the wrong bus, and while I waited two days in Oruru for it to arrive (it did), Avi caught the train south to Uyuni, in the desert. Elad, meanwhile, abruptly changed course—he'd met these five sisters in La Paz, he explained. By the time I reached the Marith guesthouse, Avi had departed, leaving me a note on the bulletin board urging me to catch up. For four days I bumped south and west over Bolivia's vast salt flats, climbing toward Chile in a jeep that seemed to collide with Israelis in the wilderness. At a wind-formed rock outcrop, I met Hanit ("It means ‘Spear' "), a skinny Sephardic woman who'd just finished her service in the IDF ("of course") and had just come from El Lobo ("of course"). The next day, atop a cactus-covered island in the vast salt pans, at something like 13,000 feet, I stumbled on a couple of guys from Haifa tricked out in ten-gallon Stetsons. They'd bought the hats while passing through Boulder, Colorado, a few months before. We'd been talking for two minutes when one of them said, "You mean Avi with the long hair? Sure, we know him." Avi was up ahead, "somewhere out there," they said, pointing toward the snowcapped 20,000-foot Andean peaks along the Chilean border. On my last night in Bolivia, in the guest register of a tiny village museum, I saw that Avi had signed out that morning. After crossing the border and dropping down into the desert oasis of San Pedro de Atacama, I promptly ran into Hanit again. But this was a tourist town—too expensive for Israelis, she said. The bus station was crowded with her sticker-shocked countrymen, including a dreadlocked couple with a baby, five years into their global ramble. Hanit and I took different buses south—I paid the extra $11 for a sleeper—to Santiago. Twenty-four hours of rumbling down Chile's desert highways dropped me in the gritty capital. It was easy enough to follow the Israeli trail, even without Avi and Elad. One Jewish person on his own is lonely, "like a candle in the dark," Elad had told me. They gravitate together, adding "another candle over here, and another candle over there," until the world grows less cold. "You put them all together," he'd said, cupping his hands, "and you have a warm fire."
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