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Published: September 11th 2012
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The bus to Sucre went via Potosi, the world’s highest city at over 4000 meters where we had to change buses. The bus was freezing as the windows kept rattling open and with the altitude of 12000 feet, it was unpleasant for most of the 9 hour journey and as if that wasn’t enough, the splitting altitude headaches returned like on the salt flats. Left with no option and no painkillers, out came the coca leaves which stopped the pain but left me wide awake until we arrived in Sucre at 5am.
Sucre, during the day it was hot enough to sunbathe in our hostels courtyard but on a night it got quite cool. It’s a common theme throughout South America, the rooms are always freezing and the showers are only lukewarm so the only way to warm up during the day is to be outside. Generally the showers here are a nightmare they are essentially a big shower head with an electric boiler on top. Printed on the side it says 30 Amp and 4mm cable. The wires coming out of the wall would bearly be sufficient to wire a door bell and to top it off
they are connected with a twist and insulation tape to a fuse right next to the shower. I had to bend down in this place because if my head got too near to the shower head I would get an electric shock......!!
Sucre is the judicial capital of Bolivia and is full of whitewashed colonial type buildings with terracotta roofs, it defiantly has a Mediterranean feel. The best thing about it is the market, it has every type of fresh fruit and veg you could want all for pennies, even the chicken and beef is well priced. We ate so well here and one night we went out for a meal with a friend we had first encountered at our hostel in Salta. She was travelling with two Aussy dudes so we decided to go for some steaks which turned out to be one of the best meals in our time travelling . Apart from absorbing the city there was not much to do so we went rock climbing with an English guy we found online. He took us to some really challenging walls with meaty overhangs and spent the morning coaching us rather than just taking
us to the wall and letting us climb.
On to La Paz, another overnight bus from hell, again in the freezing cold. Initially the bus was stinking hot so I went to speak to the driver and he offered me the seat next to him in front, he opened the window. We then had a conversation in broken Spanish, he explained that the bus was overheating and he needed the heating to be on full to keep the engine cool which was fair enough in my opinion. Then he got out his coca leaves and his drivers mate started rambling on about football and music but the driver kept looking at his dash board really close, with his head almost on the steering wheel. He would swerve off the road then back on again, once he looked up he would look at me and laugh his head off then continue the conversation. The light on the temperature gauge was broken and he couldn’t see what was happening, needless to say I didn’t feel particularly safe!! As we climbed a little higher back through Potosi the bus started to cool down so I joined the gang back upstairs
but I could still feel the bus running off the road everytime the driver checked the temperature. We finally got here in one piece a good few hours late.
La Paz is a city clinging to the walls of a vast valley, the traffic is like Bangkok but with more aggression, the place is dizzying with the fumes, horns and lack of oxygen. After we had visited the witches market that sold dried Llama foetuses and the Coca museum that told us everything about the sacred plant, we had had enough of the place. We decided we would leave and head to Peru the following day and then our plans changed dramatically as we met a couple from Liverpool. They were 3 months into a 12 month trip and were going to the places we had been so we got talking. It turned out that they were waiting for a package of natural insect repellent and soap from the UK as they were going to volunteer in the Amazon Jungle looking after Pumas and it was only costing £7 a day for all meals and lodging. It was a great way of saving some much needed cash
whilst visiting the jungle and helping out for a worthy cause. We had wanted to volunteer during our trip but every project we had looked at was really expensive. We decided to get in on the action, volunteering with the Inti Wara Yassi group at the Jacj Cuisi site in the Amazon basin, 1 hour from Rurrenabaque which itself is a 45 minute flight or a 24 hour bus ride along part of the world’s most dangerous road. We opted for the bus ride but split it over 2 days.
La Paz to Coroico used to be the world most dangerous road with sheer drops on mud roads with no barriers. In places its only one lane and the big HGV’s take priority as the road may just give way under the load especially in the rain. Thankfully most of the worst sections have been bypassed but the roads are still the same, on most corners there is a little cross or a reminder that someone has gone over the edge. We got to Coroico in one piece in little over 3 hours, it’s a tiny little settlement in the Yungas perched on the side of a
cliff but it has a swimming pool, football pitch and a few pizza places what more could you want. We visited an organic coffee plantation which turned out to be an old lady’s business. She gave us a tour of the whole process from picking through to drying and showed us how to warn the parrots off the coffee beans with the catapult! This was a very small scale operation that used traditional techniques and it looked like some of the machinery was made from car parts.
The next leg was Coroico to Caranavi, where after 30 minutes on the road we encountered a road block by the military for 2 hours just because ‘They can’, apparently it happens quite a lot. A 2 hour trip ended up being 6 but we were still in time for our connection on to Rurrenabaque through the night for 12 hours. Here is where it gets interesting......we spend most of the night airbourne literally due to the bumps on the road. We spent times reversing close to the cliff edge so trucks could pass, it’s a good job it was dark because we would have been more than apprehensive. The
drops were 100’s of metres, ignorance was bliss in this case! Once or twice the luggage compartment popped open and we were in danger of the bags going over the edge. We only knew about it when one bloke opened the window to see how close we were to the edge and he started screaming to stop. By the time we got to Rurrenabaque the panels on the bus had cracked so much we could see the sub frame underneath, it was easily the worst night of our travels, not just for the lack of sleep but for the sheer terror. We vowed to take the flight back.....at £50 it was a bargain.
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