I walked into the hostel’s lobby, agitated after the most harrowing taxi ride of my life, during which the driver threatened to veer off the mountain road at each bend and then tried to raise the price when we arrived, spurring a Spanish language argument with me. Thus shaken, it took me and my traveling buddies a bit to correctly navigate through the streets of Potosí to the hostel we’d booked. After all of this, I just wanted a bit of security and dinner for the evening. I remember plopping into a chair in the lobby, plugging my phone in to charge, and conversing with a French woman who was traveling through South America solo. We realized we’d met the same fellow traveler at…