Cochabamba

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Leaving La Paz was not as easy as we had thought it would be. Firstly our alarm was somehow accidentally turned off instead of snoozed, then when we did manage to get out of the hostel, the town was packed with locals who had turned out for the Independance Day parade. What was supposed to be a direct walk to the bus station turned into a maze as we twisted and turned to avoid marching straight through the parade. Thankfully our local knowledge picked up during our wanderings in Paz proved invaluable and we made it to the station in one piece.

As we entered the station we were immediately accosted by several people yelling destinations in our faces. As it happened, one of them was Cochabamba at the very reasonable and reduced rate of two euros per person for a 6 hour bus trip. It sounded good to us, so we loaded up on snacks, paid our bus station tax and were sitting comfortably on the bus at the advertised leaving time of 10.30am. Granted, the fact that we were one of the few people on the bus gave us an indication that we were probably a bit ambitious in our expectation that it would go on time.

About 30 minutes later, all the locals were on board and we pulled out of the station. Ten minutes later we stopped for 30 minutes in the centre of town as they touted around town to try and fill the remaining seats. It worked, they got a few more seats filled, but it was nearly midday before we left La Paz!

It was dark by the time we reached Cochabamba, but the bus trip was enjoyable as we realised that we haven’t travelled by day on many buses this trip. It is nice to see the variation in the countryside out of the window. When we got to Cochabama we walked straight out of the bus station, convinced that our hostel was just outside. It wasn’t, but we did walk straight into a vibrant night market, with the aroma of roast chicken and fried steak filling the air. There was stall after stall of street diners. The opposite side of the road was filled with clothes markets and stationary stalls. The streets were full of Bolivians.

Once we established that we were walking in the wrong direction, we rectified the situation and something else dawned on us - we weren’t cold. Having been in cities for the past 3 weeks where the minute the sun disappeared you had to wrap up well, it was a novel experience to still be warm.

We arrived at HI Versailles hostel, and immediately got worried when they didn’t appear to have the slightest clue of who we were. We showed them our online reservation number and a young man was despatched to “clean the room”. Why a hostel would need to clean a room at 7.40pm was a mystery to us, but we duly took a seat in reception and waited 20minutes.

As we reached the top of three flights of steep stairs, we were quite simply stunned with the “room” that they had prepared for us. It was an area at the side of the corridor that was sectioned off with a wood and frosted glass partition. The partition didn’t even go as high as the roof. I can only surmise that it was because we were so stunned and hungry that we didn’t kick up a fuss, instead we dumped the bags and went off in search of dinner.

If Peru was the country of pizza and pasta, then Bolivia is fast turning into the country of Roast Chicken and Chips, for peanuts! €3.50 lighter, we returned to the storage room and attempted sleep on the camping cots that had been flung into the room. It was a nightmare. We heard every passing step and were awoken each time the light was switched on in the corridor. It was the hostel from hell. Needless to say we got out of there as soon as we could the next day.

Cochabamba though is a lovely, vibrant little city. We headed to the bus station to store our luggage for the day, and then investigated the market area a bit more. La Cancha is a section of the city that is made up of about a kilometre squared of stalls. After an hour of walking around and being stared at, we came to the conclusion that you could buy everything you might need to build, kit out and live day-to-day in a house in Cochabamba. It was a surreal experience!

From the market area we walked up to the central square where we passed a very pleasant two hours in the Café Paris. I think it was its European atmosphere that attracted us, but it was their pancakes and decent coffee that kept us there so long. Eventually we emerged into the bright sunlight and spent a further couple of hours sitting in the central plaza soaking up the sun, watching the local children feeding the pigeons.

We had only ever planned a short stopover in Cochabamba, as our broader plan was to get to Sucre and spend a few days there. To do this though we had to take a 10 hour night bus from Cochabamba. In the bus station we quickly realised that there were only normal buses going to Sucre that night. Oh well, we thought, it couldn’t be much worse than going back to the hostel. We paid four euros each and waited at the assigned gate.

We should have known by now that Bolivian bus timetables are a guideline more than a defined schedule. From what we could gather our bus couldn’t pull into the bus stop until the Santa Cruz bus that was parked there was moved. And that bus wasn’t moving until it was full! 8.30pm came and went, at 8.45pm I was beginning to feel some rebellion among our co-travellers. At 8.50pm a bus company official emerged from the terminal, appearing to be frog-marched out by a Bolivian passenger. She was despatched to find a bus and bring it to us. Even as the bus pulled in behind the Santa Cruz bus the bus company official was getting a torrant of abuse from the rest of the mob. We boarded the bus quickly, stowed our rucksacks and made ourselves as comfortable as possible.

True to Bolivia bus form, the bus stopped 10 minutes later for “dinner”. We just laughed out loud as all of the previously irate passengers filed off the bus into the roadside diner. It was comical and we were at a standstill for another 30minutes.

When we did get going again, I was unable to sleep as half the curtains on the bus were open and it was an incredibly bright night. Instead I watched how the bus driver negotiated the dust path that was scarily close to the cliff edge of a deep valley. To banish all hope of sleep, the dust road then turned into cobblestones. I looked around the bus to entertain myself and was shocked (and slightly jealous) to see some people asleep on the floor of the central aisle. The bus, it turned out, doubled as a courier, and so we were also jerked to a stop every 30minutes or so while the driver pulled up to deliver a parcel.

When we crawled off the bus at 8am the next morning I hadn’t slept a wink, but we had survived, and for that much I was grateful. On first impressions Sucre seems to be a very pretty town.

More soon.

Philippe & Sinead

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Photos

Pigeon on Sinead´s shoe
How to know when you are sitting there too long...