We were unprepared for Chacaltaya. Part of the Cordillera Real in the Bolivian Andes, Chacaltaya is 17,700 feet high. It was Millie’s birthday, and we left La Paz for a day hike up Chacaltaya. The hike was challenging but uneventful. The whiteness of the snow made us squint, and we regretted not having sunglasses but didn’t think much of that until later. That night, we boarded an overnight bus to Uyuni. I’d been anxious about this leg of our journey because I’d read on the Internet that the route was prone to kidnappers targeting tourists. As the bus jolted slowly through heavy traffic, the door kept opening to let on men who conversed urgently with the driver before getting off the bus again. With my Internet-bred paranoia, I watched with trepidation as the men continued mysteriously coming and going, unreasonably fearful of potential kidnappers. Then, all of a sudden, my eyeballs were struck by the most excruciating pain. It was like a redhot metal rod had been rammed into my corneas. Like a lightswitch had been turned off, Millie and I completely lost our vision. Having gone suddenly blind at age twenty-six, and still in fear of being kidnapped, I wept. Salty tears stung my neck as I thought wistfully of the life I’d had before this wretched vacation: a nice boring corporate job, no real danger, an abundance of options for takeout sushi and overpriced workout classes. “Millie,” I hissed. My eyes were open, but everything was pitch-black. She gulped something inaudible, and though I couldn’t see, I could tell she was also weeping. “Are we permanently blind?! Did...did you learn about this in school?” (She was a medical student.) “I don’t know,” she sobbed. “We just have to wait and see.” I’d purchased travel insurance before leaving home and debated the likelihood we could both get airlifted to somewhere they could make us see again, even though Millie didn’t have travel insurance. How much would it cost? Would we be blind forever? Would I still want to live without my eyesight? All these thoughts ran through my mind as I sobbed, my jacket draped over my head so other passengers couldn’t see me crying. In the morning, the bus arrived in Uyuni, a city at the edge of the salt flats. By then, we could see blurry outlines and felt our way to a WiFi cafe. Struggling to read, we managed to Google our symptoms and figured out we had photokeratitis, or snow blindness, from our high-altitude Chacaltaya hike sans sunglasses. There was a chance we’d fully recover. We found a hostel and slept for a day - and thankfully, our vision returned. We celebrated by booking a three-day, two-night tour of the salt flats. A prehistoric lake that dried up 13,000 years ago, the Salar de Uyuni is perhaps the most bizarre and impressive landscape on earth. A very flat, white desert made of salt, it stretches over more than 6,500 square miles. Hexagons of salt crystals rise a few inches above the desert floor, decorating the surface of the salt flats with an intricate geometric design that crunches underfoot. Our guide, Ramon, was a charismatic Bolivian who zoomed us around the salt flats in a Toyota Land Cruiser named Papichulo. He barely spoke English and we barely spoke Spanish, but we enjoyed his explanations of the jaw-dropping landscape and geological history of the salt flats. We crammed ourselves into Papichulo with two Bolivian ladies, Elena and Maria, and a German couple, Jan and Jana. We visited Isla Incahuasi, a cactus-covered island formed from the top of a volcano that predated the prehistoric lake. We took ridiculous optical illusion photos on the salt flats, posing tiny beside a water bottle or “standing inside” an upside down baseball cap held by one of us who loomed gigantic. We spotted llamas and flamingos and ate lunch in an igloo of salt bricks. At the end of our tour, in the backseat of Papichulo, Elena pressed something into my palm. It was a tiny llama doll made of yarn, with googly eyeballs and a rainbow saddlebag. “It means ‘safe travels,’” she said, smiling, as we parted ways.