There's been a change of plan...

---

Day 24, 25 and 26-29th, 30th September, 1st October

These were 3 very quiet days for us, once again on the 29th it was raining and as I was still trying to shake off this cold we really didn’t do much. We’d originally planned to spend a lot longer in Argentina, however the rubbish weather and my illness meant we really were not enjoying ourselves. The fantastic thing about the way we are travelling is that if we are not liking a place, we simply move on, and this is what we decided to do. Our travel plans were completely changed while we were in Argentina. During this rainy period we’d heard about this wildlife reserve in Bolivia where you can go and volunteer for a minimum of 15 days and work with the animals and help around the reserve. You also get your own animal to look after while you’re there, be it, monkey, parrot or puma! It is also much cheaper than anywhere we’d seen as they only ask you to pay for accommodation and food, everything else is included, as for them it is more about the work you can do for them than the money you bring with you. We thought this sounded amazing and would really make our journey memorable so as we sat there in rainy Buenos Aires, we got the map out and rewrote our original route, as this would mean spending much longer in Bolivia than we’d originally intended.

First things first, we had a lot of trips planned that we needed to make sure we found time for, mainly because we really wanted to do them, secondly they are wedding presents! We knew we needed to be in Cusco in Peru for the 28th October for the Inca trail and after we finished the Inca trail we had approx 1 month until we were due to fly to New Zealand. Several hours later and a bit of swearing as we tried to fit everything in we had it. We would head to Santa Cruz in Bolivia the next day, spend a few days in the sunshine (hopefully) so I could get back to fighting fitness, then onto La Paz, down to Uyuni to do the Salt Flats, back up to La Paz, head over to Cusco and hopefully go down to Nazca and the Colca Canyon before coming back to Cusco to do the Inca trail and the Amazon. We would then either bus it or fly from Lima to Bolivia and go and work in this nature reserve for 3-4 weeks before hauling down to Santiago in Chile to fly to NZ! We weren’t 100% sure we’d be able to get to Nazca before the Inca trail so if we failed that one, we would go after we got back from the Amazon and push our flights to New Zealand back a few days as we can change them for 25 pounds. We were a little worried this would cut into our time in NZ, however a timely Skype message from the lovely Gillie offered us a place to stay for New Year in Queenstown. We’d planned to be in Sydney for New Year but we certainly couldn’t turn down the chance to bring in the New Year with friends, so it all seemed to be working out! If you managed to follow our mad plan I’m impressed!

So plan of action complete we had to get bus tickets for Santa Cruz for the next day. It is a mammoth journey, 37 hours, and not many companies do a direct bus. We’d found out via the internet that the only cama bus (not as posh as the cama suite but still pretty decent) leaving the next day only had 2 seats left so we rushed down to the bus station and managed to bag the 2 remaining seats, sweet! That completed, we decided we were hungry. Now I know Argentina is famous for the beef, but all I had eaten for days was meat, potatoes, eggs, bread and cheese, and I was craving something a bit healthier. (There is such a thing as too much steak!) So after checking out the kitchen at the hostel and finding out that it was pretty well equipped, we went to the local shop and got loads of vegetables, rice and soy sauce to make a stir fry. My god, that stirs fry was so so good. I don’t know if it’s because the vegetables were really fresh or that it had been so long since I’d seen one, but it was fantastic and I could almost feel myself getting better after eating it. I even felt up for a beer afterwards! (For those who know me and my preference for wine, you may be shocked to discover I have found a taste for cheap South American beer!) We had an early start the next day as we had to check in for our bus ride (being an international one) an hour before it left. So off to bed we went to prepare for our record breaking bus ride.

30th September
For the love of god, will I ever learn to pack the night before when we have an early start?? Once again we left the hostel in a massive rush and just about made it to the bus station in time. After we’d checked in we stocked up on snacks as although we’d been told the bus would stop, Argentina is not very veggie friendly and we were not sure how much food Ellory would be able to eat! The bus arrived and we settled in for 2 days of bus fun.

To be honest there is not much to report from the first day of the bus journey, on the first stop, at lunchtime, everyone rush off into this restaurant and got something to eat, we weren’t particularly hungry so just stretched our legs. It wasn’t until we stopped at the next place in the evening we worked out that the food was included! Oops. You sat down and the waitresses brought out bread and coca cola and then a set meal. Obviously this was all meat (I was happy as Larry, I had the best roast chicken I’ve had outside of my parents’ house!), however when we explained (in Spanish) that Ellory was a veggie and didn’t eat meat, they were brilliant and made him pasta. We were very relieved as a 37 hour bus ride is a long time only eating snacks! Pleasantly full we got back on the bus and settled in for the night.

1st October
We were woken up at 7am as the bus had stopped for a break and on a journey like that, it doesn’t matter how much you don’t want to get off the bus, you do it anyway as it could be as long as 8 hours before it stops again. So very groggy we got off for another stretch of the old legs, we were really starting to feel it now and knowing we still had another 15 hours to go didn’t help! However we knew we’d be crossing into Bolivia that day which we hoped would break up the monotony. So back on the bus again and off we trundled. The only interesting thing to report of the morning was a road blockade by some kind of protest group (we think), we were stuck on one side of the blockade for about an hour and a half before they’d let us through to continue our journey. We got to 2pm and finally reached the Bolivian border. First on the agenda however was lunch, I had the set meal of breaded steak (flipping gorgeous!) and Ellory got a salad which was apparently very nice. That done, we started the mad process of crossing the border.

Like when we crossed into Argentina it was a “on the bus, off the bus, on the bus” sort of thing. However this one was a lot more frantic and no one spoke a word of English. We were given paperwork on the bus to fill out so we could exit Argentina, so clutching our passports and these precious pieces of paper we joined the ‘salida’ (exit) queue. Everyone seems to have more paperwork than us and we were a little worried however it was absolutely fine, we got our exit stamps with no problem and even managed to check with an official that we would get our entry stamps into Bolivia further down the road. So back on the bus it was and through this crazy, crowded, busy street until we stopped by this little building in between a money exchange shop and a corner shop that apparently was the Bolivia immigration office! Course it was.... There was a little confusion with my passport as the official stamped me into Bolivia but wouldn’t give me a visa stamp, we finally worked out we needed to fill in a entry card, so got one of those and stood to one side to fill it out. These entry cards make me laugh, they ask you lots of questions about exactly how long you’ll be in the country, how you plan to travel, where you’ll be staying (lots of things we have no idea about!), so we either don’t fill those bits in or make stuff up and they never even check it. I handed my entry card to the official, got him to add the 90 day visa stamp to my passport stamp and we were done! Drama of the day completed we got back on the bus and headed off to our final stop, Santa Cruz.

We arrived in Santa Cruz at 22.30 and prayed that the $4 US we had with us would be enough to get us to the hostel (it was). We were staying at the Jodanga Hostel and knew it was a little way out of town. So we arrived in this little residential street and proceeded to receive the warmest welcome of anywhere we have been in South America, we can not recommend this place enough. We’d slept most of the day on the bus and were not tired so the owner (Andres) asked us if we wanted to join himself and his friends for a beer. (p.s you get a free beer when you arrive at this hostel, bonus!). They were really nice and more than happy to speak with us in English and slowly in Spanish so we could practise understanding people. Our room was massive and clean and there was a lovely pool and we knew we would enjoy this city. A few beers later we headed off to bed.

---