The Means to an End

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Jake:

This is the part of our journey in which we truely travel. Check out where we slept over the course of 7 days:

Night 1: Adequate overnight bus to La Paz
Night 2: A bed in that awful hotel (Asturia - don´t ever go there)
Night 3: Less than adequate overnight bus to Sucre
Night 4: A bed in a good hostel (Residencial Bolivia)
Night 5: The worst bus existing to Santa Cruz
Night 6: A row of 3 chairs in Santa Cruz Airport
Night 7: The plane to Rio de Janeiro

Thats two beds in seven nights people. I don´t need to say any more.

After night 4 in our last blog, though, it became stangely and welcomingly fun. The bus we saw as a 13 hour personal challenge, which we conquered after 17 hours in reality and a lifetime in my head. From then, drunk with fatigue, we stumbled through the hours fully entertained. I can´t quite say I understand why but I look back today and kind of miss the 22 hour airport-stint and all those games of cards! Things were looking up with Brazil on the horizon.

So, then - from Sucre: As simple as getting a flight from there to Brazil it most definately wasn´t, as you can tell by the chronology above. We first had to travel some way west to the city and airport of Santa Cruz in order to catch our flight. Having noted well that since the first coach in Peru they had been getting steadily worse and worse it was not a surprise to look upon the dilapedated state of our vessel for the next night and day. Fortunately we came to board later than most, having to put up with our environment for precious seconds fewer than the rest of the passengers.

The first thing I noticed after I took my seat was the blaring indiginous (but not delightfully so) music beating from the speaker above my head. A relentless barrage over the course of the journey it turned out to be, which only lessened to an agreeable listenening volume at some point in the middle of the night. But ha! it didnt matter because I had my earplugs from our lovely distant memory of a first class transatlantic flight. Have to do better than that to get to me Bolivia - I´m on my way to Brazil, I thought.

Oh, but it did. The traveller/local ratio was at an all time low on the coach and it really gave me the opportunity to appreciate things that are just a part of their lives that would be court-case-worthy in ours. At our first stop I was amused to see so very many men, women and children pour forth from the ruddy depths of the seats behind us. It gave the impression of some post-apocolyptic clown-car given its occupants and surroundings. Upon boarding again I gathered that it was packed maybe three people to every two seats, and toward the back (in the cheaper section) God´s divine creations could be seen crawling over and amongst themselves, nuzzling the fleshier parts of each other for comfort and together manifesting a single, direly uncomfortable, writhing mass.

Rach had had the sense to shotgun the window seat before I even thought about it, but I suppose had I been quicker etiquette would have dictated the same outcome. As a result I sat beside a little local girl, maybe seven or eight, who had been relegated by her mother/grandmother/owner to sleep in the aisle in the cold. She didn´t complain at her predicament in the slightest and I think its that that made me feel sorry for her more than anything else. So there I was, dozing off and suddenly feeling her elbow on my hand or her head on my leg and having to gingerly pry it off. I wasnt angry at all because she honestly must´ve been having a harder time than me and was just trying to aquire some comfort, but it didn´t make the hours pass any faster!

As I said though, it was more a challenge than anything. We did get to see how they locals travelled, we did subject ourselves to that which they had to on routine basis and we came out the other side all in one piece! And, as a bonus, no one had taken or tampered with our bags - the brown coach-air had just covered them in a fine layer of dust. My lungs must´ve looked about the same.

Rach:

After enduring the night bus from Sucre to Santa Cruz I can say with no qualms that I have definately, even if at no other point, submersed myself fully in a culture of the complete antithesis of my own.
I can also say that I´ve spent twenty-two hours in an airport and not been bored for a second of it!
Upon our arrival at Santa Cruz airport, almost a whole day and night before our plane was due to depart, and after the hard core travelling of the previous seven days we felt that we´d been presented with the ultimate of luxuries; the ability to have a wash and brush our teeth, to actually get a few hours uninterrupted sleep (which we had to do in shifts for fear of missing our check-in time) and to get in a LOT of games of cards, taking our tally up to six-hundred games since our first night in Lima (we´ve had a lot of time to fill waiting for buses!). We were also rewarded with the Subways we had been craving since the Inca Trail, one for each meal of the day and one each while on bag-watch while the other slept.
Wiling away the hours in Subway we also noticed that the dress of the people around us was gradually becoming less and less indiginous and I was astounded to see an actual ipod Touch and we knew we were heading to a place quite different from that which we´d come.
Our plane was delayed for just an hour, our last hour in Bolivia and one extra hour of being unaware of the wonder of Rio de Janeiro lying on the other side of the border.

Rach and Jake x

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