Advertisement
Published: November 29th 2007
First morning in Santa Cruz
View from the roof of our hostelHere's the story in Bolivia.
We arrived at 2am in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. With a hostel reservation in hand, we caught a taxi. The adventure began when our driver admitted to having no clue where the hostel was, and we spent close to 40 minutes driving around in circles. Finally, we pulled up to a shady little hole in the wall place....no wonder we missed it.
We paid the cabby and rang the bell. A few minutes later, the doorman stumbles down the stairs and explains either that there weren't any rooms or that the hostel doesnt exist anymore (its hard to decifer anything from a drunken bolivian man). So after exchanging a few harsh words with him for his lack of help, we set out walking the streets, packs and all, looking for a new place to sleep. Mind you, we were in an area even shadier than that hostel, so Gregor and I put all our valuables in our money belt and i slipped the memory card of my camera into my bra. Luckly, we came across a few policewomen patrolling the streets before anyone else, and they showed us to a decent place to
crash for the night.
It was $8 USD a night (which is on the pricier side in bolivia) but we didnt care. The bed was a lumpy mattress on a slab of rusted springs and protruding metal bars, sunk-in in the middle and the room was at best 8x8 feet, including the bathroom/shower (see below for pictures) with corners full of spiderwebs. But it didnt take us long to fall asleep after the day we had!
The next day, we just lazed about and watched the courtship of pigeons ( must have been the season). The parks were beautiful, the public bathrooms were scary.... Other than that, we enjoyed sunsets on the roof of our hostel, walks through the colonial looking streets and shopping the markets. Oh...and getting yelled at by the police for laying down on the benches in the park (see pictures for our little act of defiance).
After about 5 days of doing nothing (very difficult for us to do...) we decided to head off to La Paz to try our luck at working, which is, we think, a nice place to end this blog and leave for the next.
Until then,
Gregor
Defying the Bolivian Police
"muahahaha....quick! here they come!" and Emily
Advertisement
Tot: 0.112s; Tpl: 0.031s; cc: 11; qc: 63; dbt: 0.0547s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Deb Hamilton
non-member comment
Love the Gremily graffitti
Hi . . . this is Gregor's mama and I LOVE the Gremily graffitti. I think the name Gremily is clever and welded permanently into the Hamilton family psyche. How nice that the southern hemisphere now knows about Gremily!!!!