In most people’s life, one often desires an adventure. We four friends, who traveled to La Paz for a three-day stay, thought we were sadly ending our journey one Wednesday night when scheduled to travel back to Santa Cruz. Little did we know that we were embarking on another adventure, an unforeseen quest to get home.
We spent our last day in La Paz doing last minute shopping and picture taking. At 4pm we finally stop to eat a restaurant before we leave on our 530pm bus. Food came at 5pm (45 minutes late) and we were running out of there by 5:07pm feeling a little sick. After catching a taxi going the wrong direction, getting stuck in traffic, losing one of our bags full of gifts, a bible, books, and pictures, shedding some tears and chasing our bus down in El Alto, we finally boarded our bus. We all breathed a sigh of relief and sit in our bus ready to start the journey back to Santa Cruz. Little did we know that was just the beginning of our adventure.
At about 1:30am that night, one of the drivers comes upstairs to the second floor of the bus, and announces in a meek voice that there had been mudslides and that we are not permitted to pass. Ignoring one passenger’s question of “what are we going to do?,” he retreats back to the cockpit and turns off the bus. We sit there until we are awoken the next morning by vendors outside selling breakfast, beans and fried fish, to the passengers of our bus and all of the other passengers of competing bus lines. Realizing we had not moved at all during the night, we ask one of our seat neighbors what is our current location. She replies that she is unsure but that we are just outside of Cochabamba about ten hours away from Santa Cruz. Sigh. After accepting the fact that we were not going to get into Santa Cruz by 9am as originally planned, we get off the bus to stretch, take a potty break in a nearby field, and buy some food and water. Other activities that morning included running away from a moving tractor trailer, jumping on a moving bus, screaming ”this is a conspiracy!”,and standing by watching other passengers exchanged not so friendly words with the drivers.
Finally, at 9:30am, we are allowed to pass through. We stopped for lunch at a pensión and at another time for a drug search. A few hours later when we saw a sign that read, “30 km Santa Cruz”, we all thought at that point that nothing could go wrong. Then the dreadful bus stop and once again one of the drivers came upstairs and announced once again in his meek voice that there is a political blockade and that we are stuck in a jam. So there we were once again…stuck. At this point, we decided to be proactive and after an hour of waiting, we got off the bus with all of our baggage and joined the throngs walking to find taxis on the other side of the blockade. We made friends along the 45-minute walk. We saw that we had made a good decision after seeing the hundreds of cars, trucks, micros that were stuck, some since 3pm. We make it back to CCM at around 730pm. After 26 hours of traveling, the lesson learned was it is wise to fly during rainy season and that patience truly is a virtue.
No comments:
Post a Comment