Crossing the Border

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Police Reports

At the urging of the police at the bus station, we spent another day in Potosi so that they could find my laptop and return it to me, otherwise they would give me a report of the theft the next night. I wasn´t overly confident of either of those things happening, so the next day I went to the Potosi police department to make a report. Despite the language barrier, we got through the reporting process and I was sent to the room next door where I had to buy a B$10 certificate if I wanted a copy of the report. I know it´s not much to pay but having to pay anything for a police report was still pretty scabby. I took the report through to the cop and he told me it would take five minutes to type it up and print it out. Half an hour later he finished, a combination of single finger typing and stopping to talk to every single person who walked through the office just slightly stretching his five minutes out.
We left the police station report in hand and as I looked through it I realized he had said the theft had taken place at 0800, as in 8 in the morning, not in the evening. I went back and pointed out his typo, not sure how to say AM/PM, by saying “no ocho, veinte” (“not eight, twenty”). He got all pissed off at this point, asking me why didn´t I say veinte in the first place? Because I said “ocho a la noche” (“eight at night”) and people don´t say veinte, dickhead. He penned in a PM after the 0800 and then acted as if I was asking him for his first born child when I asked him to stamp and sign the typo. He stamped it, without inking the stamp so a small stain came up and thrust it back at me.
We headed out to the bus terminal at 7PM. I really was sad to be leaving Potosi this way. It had been such a beautiful, friendly city (thieves and that one cop aside) but it would forever be tainted in my memory. We went to the same bus company as the night before, they recognized us and charged us B$25 each, rather than the B$40 it actually cost, which was decent of them. I went to the police station at the terminal where they gave me a theft report for free and we boarded our 8:30PM bus.
Our seats on the bus were taken by an old lady and a young bloke. They pointed to the seats over the aisle, as if to say that those were actually our seats. Not wanting to cause a scene, we took the alternate seats and, surprisingly, two minutes later someone came up and told us we were in their seats. The old lady moaned and groaned but she and her young counterpart moved to their seats and the boss and I took up our own.
The bus pulled out and, shortly after leaving town, the bus driver turned off the lights in the bus and turned on the radio. If I never hear Bolivian folk music again, it will be far too soon. I drifted off close to midnight and awoke again as the bus made its first stop at around 1AM. We soon departed again but the bus stop woke a lot of people up and the two women sitting behind us decided that it was a good time to start having a loud chat. Were they serious? It´s bad enough having to deal with crying babies and whingeing toddlers when you were trying to sleep on a bus but two people old enough to know exactly how many people they were inconveniencing was ridiculous. I tried to say something to the tune of “It´s one o´clock in the morning” but they took that as me egging them on to talk louder. Eventually someone said something to them and so they turned it down a little bit.
We arrived in to Tupiza a little after 3AM and as we drew in I saw a sign advertising cash advances on credit cards. Suddenly the advice Cormac (one of the guys from Ambue Ari who we had also met in Santiago) gave me came rushing back – “take money with you to Tupiza because they don´t have an ATM”. We had about $B250. Shit.
We had made a point of coming to Tupiza because it was the town (well actually, it´s very close to the town) where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were gunned down. Specifically, we had come here to ride horses, an activity we soon discovered cost around a minimum of $B100 each. Too tired to deal with it, we found a nearby hostel and crashed out.

Overt Racism

We woke the next morning at around 11 and I made a snap decision. “Let´s just go,” I said to the Boss. It was a frustrating decision to have to make – to get the next bus to the border when we had been on a bus headed for the border and got off specifically to ride horses in Tupiza – but I had had enough of Bolivia. The robbery had compounded my feelings but, as the Boss summed it up, you´re not made to feel welcome there. There had been Bolivians along the way who had been friendly and welcoming but most just wanted your money and for you to leave. Some didn´t even want your money as we soon discovered.
We went looking for a place to get some lunch and ended up at a cafe near the bus station. We took a seat before the waitress came over and said “no almuerzo”, (“no lunch”). We looked around – there were tables full of people eating and, at 1PM, it was clearly lunch they were eating.
“No comida?” (“No food?”) The Boss asked.
“No,” the waitress replied.
I was shocked. Not the kind of shock that leads one to drop their monocle but the kind where you don´t know what to say. It was the first time I had been denied service based on the colour of my skin. I felt a very strong urge to spit on the floor of the cafe but I decided against it and was glad I did as walking out the door a bus load of men came in.
We ended up at a pizzeria (again) and got it to takeaway. I got a cash advance on my credit card at an outrageous 20%!c(MISSING)ommission in case the next town we got to didn´t have an ATM and we were on the 2PM bus for Villazon – Bolivia´s border town with Argentina.
The bus to Villazon was ridiculously overcrowded, with every seat taken and the length of the aisle filled with people. A woman leaned on my chair, her arse pushing me over on to the Boss for most of the trip (why didn´t I offer the woman my seat? Trust me, after a couple of months in South America, you lose all delusions of chivalry.) The funniest part of the trip was the woman´s son, who was standing in the aisle directly in front of me. He was about 10 years old and every five or so minutes he would go for a good old fashioned scratch/feel/grope of his downstairs parts. This sounds terribly paedophilic on my part but it was right there in my face and the kid had no shame about it. I don´t know if he was itchy or just rearranging but he took to doing it frequently and with all the subtlety of porn star.
Speaking of paedophilia (we were, weren´t we?) at this stage I was reading “Wild Justice” by Wilbur Smith. One of the authors I had always seen but never bothered to read, I had grabbed this book as I left Ambue Ari. It was about international terrorism and featured one of those deadly female assassins who goes all weak at the knees when she finally meets the right man – so, y´know, highly realistic stuff.
Anyway, here´s a few brief excerpts from the novel.
“He held her for a long moment, neither of them able to speak. She was so slim and warm, her body seeming to throb with life and vitality...”
“She smiled through the tears and on tiptoe she reached up to kiss him full on the mouth...”
“When it was time for bed she came and sat on his lap and traced the lines of his face with her fingertip...” (all page 18)
“She kissed him again and her lips tasted of sugar and Ovaltine...” (page 19)
This all sounds reasonable enough, right? Until you find out it´s the protagonist´s 13-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER doing all the throbbing and full mouth kissing. Then when he finally does start shagging a woman who´s age appropriate and not his daughter, he takes particular pleasure in her “childlike breasts”.
But I think the creepiest line of the book was reserved for the protagonist´s brother.
“Now he turned to Melissa-Jane and hugged her with barely a touch of incestuous pleasure.”
Barely a touch – give that man a medal. Wilbur, I won´t be reading your stories again and may God have mercy on your soul.
We arrived in Villazon in the afternoon and bought a ticket from one of the Bolivian vendors for ARG$100 each (it´s roughly 4 pesos to the dollar). From there we had to walk across the border to get to Argentina but the departures from Bolivia office were empty. We tried to get our departure stamp but it wasn´t happening. So we walked got our entry stamps to Argentina and kept going.
We had an 8PM bus for Salta and the famous Argentinean buses did not disappoint. It was clean, comfortable, spacious and they had flat screens for movies (“Frozen” and “Predators”, both in Spanish but neither of which require any understanding of the dialogue to follow).
We dozed most of the way and arrived in to Salta just before 5AM. With the sun yet to rise, we decided we were likely to be charged for the night if we went directly to a hostel, so we waited for an hour at the terminal, drinking coffee and planning our time in Argentina.
We arrived at Hostel Los Cardones just after 6AM. We were officially in Argentina.

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