The long and winding road

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As soon as we crossed the border into Bolivia (after an 8 hour night-bus ride on the last of the luxury coaches) I knew we were in the South America of my imagination - Hordes of people swarmed around the bus offering to carry our bags (for a fee) and wrinkled old women fried empanadas on the street outside rickety houses constructed from corrugated iron and chipboard. Things started to get ugly when none of the bus companies would sell us a direct ticet to Tupiza - a journey which should have taken 3 hours - and insisted that we go via Tarija (8 hours) and catch another bus from there (10 hours). Things got nastier still when it was discovered that we hadn´t actually crossed the border at Villanzon at all, but at Yuciba, a good few hundred miles east, lengthening our travelling time by 15 hours and losing another day. I began to seethe. With nothing conceivable to be done, we bought tickets to Tarija, and I mentally prepared myself for 18 hours on Bolivias decidedly non-luxury coaches, with the prospect of negociating yet another bus station in the middle. Long bus journeys were getting to be an unpleasant habit, and I began to wish that we weren´t trying to cover quite as much of the continent in the (rapidly diminishing) time available.

The bus to Tarija stopped anywhere and everywhere to pick people up, most of them seemingly travelling with all their worldly possessions. The hairpin bends kept the driver´s hand firmly on the horn, and there were enough children travelling to ensure that as soon as one stopped howling, another would start up. I won´t go into the terror I felt the first time we bombed round a corner to find ourself nose to nose (on a road barely wide enough for a small car) with a heavily laden truck. On the plus side, the scenery was beautiful - surprisingly fertile mountains, their summits wreathed in cloud, and desert-like, cactus-strewn plains where all that was missing was a saloon bar and the tumbleweed. Cows, goats and donkeys roamed across the countryside, often seeing the road as nothing more than a smoother extention of that same countryside (which, in effect, it was). New roads were under construction everywhere- either that or old roads had been buried by landslides - the lack of machinery made it hard to tell.

The bus station at Tarija proved surprisingly easy to negotiate, although we got stung with a horrible exchange rate changing our pesos to bolivianos (i never change money on the border as rates are normally the worst in the country. turns out here that the further away from the previous country you get, the worse the exchange rates get). Getting back on a bus, on the other hand, was not pleasant. The fact that it was a night bus did nothing to lessen the frequent pick ups, and at one stage the bus resembled a tube at rush hour. Thankfully, this thinned out after a while, and I was able to grab a few hours sleep before we hit a particularly bumpy stretch of road, and the luggage compartment disgorged its contents into my lap.

Yes, this was what I had been expecting from South America, and for all my complaints, I am loving every minute. I didnt´come travelling to spend my time doing things I can do at home, in places that look like home, even if they are cheaper. Tomorrow we leave on a 4 day, 5 person jeep tour taking in the salt plains, geysers, hot springs and Volcanos. I can´t wait.

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