After arriving, our guide and driver took us on our way to where we were supposed to spend the night. As the day cooled down to a comfortable temperature, the sun set a brilliant fiery orange over the mountains. We passed shining golden fields of sunflowers, interspersed with empty dirt fields. Then it was into the mountains, rolling hills at first which rose in and out of patches of desert. In the desert segments, perhaps they’d tried to plant stuff, sparse little trees whose greenery was only little tufts stood sadly here and there. It made me think of the hair on those creepy troll dolls.
The hills and mountains were beautiful too, in a plain sort of way. The smaller ones looked like a bulldozer had simply piled dirt and sand at a construction site, but then they got higher and higher, until it was impossible to say they were anything but mountains.
As we drove on, the moon rose, glowing and swollen in the night. I swam in and out of sleep, as by this time it was nearing midnight at the end of a very long day, and each time my eyes managed to open it was darker and darker. The sun sets impossibly late in the summers of this place. We drove through mountains, the only road for miles winding back and forth with no lights whatsoever, save for our own headlights. It was a mysterious sort of thing; I kind of liked it. It was almost like being on an airplane, where nothing can be recognized or defined outside the windows, but unlike the sterile and detached capsule of a plane, the van had many windows through which the night could seep in and consume us.
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