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The tourists are revolting...
...must be all that travelling without a decent shower...Well, just when I thought my Bolivian experience could not get any more exciting (in a really frustrating boring way).
I got a phone call in the morning to say that my bus to Uyuni would be leaving 3 hours early. "How strange", thought I.
So I arrive at the bus station at 3pm. "It´s leaving on time now". Great. So I´ll just hang around for 3 hours then.
So at 6.30, off we go. What lay ahead was to be unpleasant. The road once you get south of Oruro is unpaved, and extremely rough. And at night it get´s VERY cold. -15°C ouside, Ice on windows inside.
Luckily, I had my 98 bolivianos (7-8 quid) sleeping bag. That generates enough static electricity to power a small city. Every time I moved I was treated to my very own personal little fireworks display.
So we arrive at Uyuni early in the morning. Well, a couple hundred yards outside, as there´s a blockade. The drivers, all 3 of whom are completely hammered, are giggling as they tell us we have to get off and walk the rest of the way. I think that´s what they said, they could barely talk. That´s what we did anyway. In the freezing cold.
So, once in the town, we find everything closed, and also that the whole town is on strike. Oh yeah, and nobody is allowed to leave. Great. Something to do with president Evo deciding a soon to be built tarmac road would have to wait til 2025 because he wanted the money for something else. Apparently the tour agents and bus companies all new 2 weeks before that this was gonna happen, and also that it had started 2 days before I left La Paz. Nice of the company to just take our money and run.
Met 2 French girls in the hostal who were determined to leave, so we started visiting all the hostals in town to collect a list of names of tourists who wanted to leave. This eventually lead to a huge group of tourists camped outside the civic committee building. Trust the French to show them how to protest properly. Although I couldn´t convince them to set fire to anything, which was disappointing. The beloved clock-tower was high on my hit-list.
However, the President of the committee kept telling us one thing one hour, another the next, putting us off and off. All 60-70 of us.
Finally they said we´d have 2 buses between 7 and 8, and to gather at a certain hotel. So we did. 8 came, no bus. 8.30 come 2 buses, but we can´t get on. Still no official authorisation to leave. 9 or 10, buses leave. It´s too cold.
Long story short, we finally got 2 buses to Potosí at 1am. 6 hours north to get there, again cold, awful roads. Can kinda understand why they´re not happy that the tarmac one is not being built. Then straight back onto a 10 hour bus down to Villazón and the border with Argentina. And civilization. Onto another bus, 8 hours ON TARMAC to Salta (including a couple of irritating customs stops), and here I am, rested, warm, showered, and wearing clean clothes. Yippee.
On to Cordoba for a couple days mañana, then back to big bad BA for a long weekend. Can´t wait.
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Bradders
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The peoples flag
I'm sure you had a nice sing along of "the peoples flag, is deepest red, it covers all our martyrs dead"... to go along with your tourist revolution! - You know mate, if you'd predicted any of your shenanigans before going, no-one would have believed them. - Keep living the dream dude :0)