On the road again

---

Day 91-93.

5th-7th December

So Sunday the 5th of December had arrived, we had to leave La Senda Verde, our flight to New Zealand was in 2 days and we still had to get to Santiago. With very heavy hearts (and heads from the drinking the night before!) we packed up our things and brought them down to the main refuge. Our plan was to ask the Gravity guys very nicely if they could find a space for us in the jeep going back to La Paz, otherwise we’ve have to get a taxi to Corioco, then a bus to Villa Fatima and then a taxi to central La Paz where our hostel was. So we spent the morning saying goodbye to the monkeys, this was highly emotional for me, they’re so smart and can sense human emotions so we had lots of them all around us, playing and just generally hanging out.

It was a very small group with Gravity that day (3!), so they arrived pretty early at around 1.30pm. Gavin the star had a word with Leith, the guide and soon enough we had a lift back to La Paz, for free! Nice one. However that meant we would be leaving within a couple of hours, so once again we went back to the pool area. I basically spent the next two hours crying, we’d become very close with the monkeys, all the other animals and the staff there, and the thought of leaving was extremely painful. But soon it was time to go. We said goodbye to Vicky and Marcelo who’d been just amazing, they are truly very special people and we will definitely be returning. Then it was the turn of Marisa and Ben and I was in floods by this point, I didn’t want to go! However the jeep was waiting so we grabbed our bags and walked across the bridge to the main gate. Becky and Linda decided to follow us, and the sight of them standing side by side on the bridge with a ‘where are you going?’ expression finished both of us off!

It was a very sad journey back to La Paz, however we had one thing to distract us, we were driving up to La Paz on the World’s Most Dangerous Road! (If the groups are small enough, Gravity drive back up the road after cycling down it!) This was an experience, the road is crazy! Most of the time it is only wide enough for one car and on one side you have a sheer cliff and on the other a sheer drop of about 1000ft! The history of the road was that it was built by POWs in the 1930s as a road from La Paz to the Yungas. Since it’s opening, approx 300 people die on it every year and the worst accident to date is when a bus with 100 people inside went off the edge. In 2006 a new road opened, and these days most cars and trucks take that route and the old road is mostly for cycling companies who take groups down the road on mountain bikes. Although you do occasionally see normal vehicles driving down it! All along the road are crosses to show where someone died; there are a lot of them. So it was a pretty mental, but very beautiful and it was a good distraction technique. We were soon back in La Paz and checked into the Brewhouse hostel, claimed our free beer and had something to eat. We had a long day the next day and it had been a long day, so we got an early night.

Early in the morning on the 6th I checked my emails as I hadn’t had the chance since we’d booked our plane tickets to Santiago. And there it was, ‘Card declined’, oh hell, we had no plane tickets for that day and we had a flight to Auckland the next day! Cue running around like mad trying to get it sorted and getting a bit stressed! We couldn’t get on a flight that day so we bought 2 tickets for the 12.25 flight on the 7th (ended up being cheaper as well!), which would get us into Santiago at 18.30. Then we would have nearly 5 hours in Santiago airport until our flight to NZ at 23.10. We booked another night in the hostel and we were sorted. Annoyed, but sorted. We spent the rest of the day doing a final bit of shopping in La Paz and getting ourselves ready for the next day. It was DEFINITELY going to be a long one.....

So the 7th was a day of flying. Our flight to Santiago was not nonstop, and the first leg was the flight to Arica in Chile, where, although we were not disembarking there, we had to get off the plane, get our bags, get the Chile entrance stamp, get our bags checked and then get back on the plane. Not good. We then flew to Antofagasta and then finally into Santiago. We were both pretty grumpy by then to be honest! No human should have to sit through the safety talk that many times in 5 hours! However we had made it and had enough time in Santiago airport to get something to eat, have several glasses of wine and get ready to get onto the plane. Or so we thought. Our flight was delayed by about 2 hours and it was very late indeed when we finally took off from Santiago. We also found out that even though Ellory had requested a vegetarian meal from LAN, it had not gone through and there was no veggie meal for him. Bad times indeed on a 13.5 hour long flight. They managed to make a meal for Ellory out of what they had but he was pretty damn cross at LAN. Fortunately, there was the video on demand thing again so that kept us both pretty entertained as we crossed 17 time zones and the International Date Line, we were about to lose a day.

---