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Published: February 9th 2007
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After a nightmare night from Tupiza to Tarija (Tar-e-ha), I arrived safely in the city of Tarija more than an hour behind schedule. I really didn't mind arriving late, because this means I ended up in Tarija at 6:45AM instead of 5:30AM, much easier to look for a hostel at this time than at 5:30AM when there is still little light. The first thing I did when I got off the off was to make sure that the other bus that my friends were on arrived safely. The bus was sitting at the bus terminal empty with no one on the bus so I guess they made it to Tarija fine. The windshield of the bus was broken and taped together, which I found out some time later was from the accident with the jeep the night before. I think the worse thing that happened to my bus was that it hit the rocks on the side of the road at one point. So I marched into the city centre to find a place to stay for the next few nights. Standing in a corner between two buildings, I found one of my Israeli friends standing there with the luggage for
him and his girlfriend, but she was no where in sight. Obviously they hadn't found a hostel in town yet either. I found out from him that she was running around looking for places to stay and that we was to look after the luggage. When she returned, she didn't have much good new. Places were either full, had rooms in the basement, or were too expensive. I checked out one place which had room for us but we could not check in until 1PM. Rooms with baño compartido (shared bathrooms) only cost 25 Bs here and you can't get much cheaper than that. We were allowed to leave our luggage at the hostel until we were able to check in and the owner of the place let us use the showers to clean up after an all-night bus ride.
After a quick search for a breakfast spot, which is not very easy in Tarija, we found a place off of one of the plazas that served a good continental breakfast, with fresh fruit salad, which doesn't get included with breakfast very often here. After breakfast, we all went to use the internet and I needed to get one
Siesta Time in Tarija
Between 12PM and 3PM, it is siesta time in Tarija and there really is nobody on the streets. of my memory cards burnt to city otherwise I would be not able to take pictures. The bus ride from Tarija to La Paz, is suppose to be a 17 hour ordeal and at this point, I was sick of taking buses, so I checked out the three airlines to see what they could offer me for the upcoming weekend. TAM, Transporte Aereo Militar, the military airline had the cheapest flights but I would have to stop in Sucre, Santa Cruz and then La Paz with a total of six hours of traveling time. Between LAB (Lloyd Aereo Boliviano) and AeroSur, the cheapest of flights were with LAB at about $100 Canadian, so I decided to think about it during the afternoon and head back to book a ticket, if I wished to, in the afternoon.
I headed back to the hotel at around 1PM and was able to check into my room and then I headed out by myself to explore. I had read that siesta time in Tarija is from noon to 3PM (and half an hour longer than my lunch break), however, unlike La Paz that still buzzes during those hours, there was no one in
the streets and the stores were all shut down. It was a good time to walk around Tarija, but I couldn't really go anywhere as anything was closed. I did find someone selling slushies with milk in the plaza. I decided to see if my stomach could handle this as I had no idea the milk was sitting out for (and as I writing this after the fact, I can say that I had no problems). I decided to explore the other side of the river where there was a large, modern, Christ statue overlooking the city. It took two attempts to find out how to get up to the top of this hill, but I finally found a way which I later found out was definitely not the main road to get to the top, considering there were trees laying across the road blocking it at the bottom. The top of the hill was the town cemetery, but strangely enough for Bolivia, the graves were in the ground rather than in crypts like in all other cemeteries I have seen in Bolivia. I know it sounds morbid that I have seen all these cemeteries but they are the main
focus of some town and villages. Finally, I headed back into the city centre and ended up running into Lesley, my friend from La Paz, and visited the cathedral with here. The first time we went to the front door, the door to the cathedral was locked and then we walked around the cathedral and it was open. Of course, there were no posted hours here. I decided that flying back to La Paz was a better option than the long bus ride, so I went to purchase my ticket from LAB after for the Saturday so I would have a day of rest before heading back to work. I headed back to the hotel to find my Israeli friends to make plans with them and Lesley for what we would do later in the evening. Lesley and I headed to a restaurant to have supper and then met up later on with our friends for ice cream before calling it a night pretty early. My body was needing sleep at this point because unfortunately, even though I had lots of room to sleep on the bus the night before, I was concentrating too much on the winding, mountain-side road
to Tarija to actually sleep.
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