The most interesting bus ride of my life! Sucre to Tarija, Bolivia.

I arrived frantically to the ticket office to check my bag 30 minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave. It turns out I was the first one there. The ticket office is located directly above the bus departure gate. You check your luggage at the office and they lower it down by a rope with a hook to a gang of cackling children waiting below.

The little boys grab the bags, like a bunch of ants over taking a fallen crumb, and carry/drag them to the bus, where a mammoth señora tells them where to place them in the luggage compartment of the bus. The little girls giggle and yell taunts in Quechua and Spanish as the boys struggle with giant backpacks twice their weight. I giggle along with them and they seem to notice, as a few of them make eye contact with me every time a little boy lets out a particularly strained grunt or struggles to push and awkwardly shaped item wrapped in an old blanket or plastic sheeting.

I board the bus. Miguel sits next to me and starts talking immediately. He is embarrassed because he thought I was Argentine. You could tell that he never would have dreamed of starting a conversation with an American girl. He starts to blush and apologize. Once he realizes that we can communicate, conversation really takes off. I like Miguel. We talk about everything from nutrition to the Davinci Code, to cars made in Asia, to our philosophical beliefs regarding if "madre tiera" causes earthquakes when she is mad at us for polluting too much (he thinks so). We talk for 3 hours or so, until my ability to hold conversations in Spanish is completely drained and I find myself asking him to repeat nearly everything he says. I swear he starts slipping some Quechua in... I´m getting lost.... he keeps talking....faster.

Did I mention that this bus has no bathroom? Yes, this 16 hour bus ride has NO BATHROOM. When we make a 10 minute stop in Potosi to let Miguel and others off, I make a bee line for the bathroom, even though I don´t need to go yet. I didn´t drink much of anything for most of the day before in anticipation of this bathroomless journey.

I get back on the bus and a tiny young woman with an adorable two and a half year old and two reasonably sized suitcases follows me. I don´t know how she is holding all that stuff. When I reach my seat, I realize that she, the child, and the two suitcases are meant to fit in the seat next to me for the next... how many hours? I look at my watch and realize that it has stopped. For the next who knows how many hours, I am stuck here between the bus window and a pile of luggage, a baby, and a young woman.

I´m impressed how she is able to slide the bags under the seat and her legs. She reclines the seat and lays the baby on her stomach. The kid instantly falls asleep. She is clearly super woman, and she has obviously done this before. She even looks comfortable. Before not too long, she falls asleep as well. I am amazed.

When we pull out from Potosi, the lights are turned off in the bus and our individual reading lights don´t work. It´s pretty much pitch dark and it´s only... I can´t tell the time anymore, maybe 7:30? Cumbia music starts blasting through the darkness and I begin to laugh. There is nothing to do but put my seat back and look out the window at the amazing display of stars and the faint silhouettes of the mountains. I smile and curl up in my sleeping bag as if I´m camping under the open sky.

Lights on. Fifteen minute bathroom/dinner stop. I go into the restaurant and ask where the bathroom is, a far greater concern to me than food. He says "outside." I wander around outside. No bathroom in sight. I ask someone else. He says "mas abajito." Ok. I wander in the dark down the hill until I reach a store front blocked off by a picket fence. I peek my head in and yell "alo!!" until an old woman with grey braids down to her knees saunters in. I ask for the bathroom. She says there isn´t one. I whimper a bit and she sends me across the street to a nearly identical little store front. I say "excuse me" to the old man whose back is turned to me. He looks at me as if he´s seen a ghost, as if he has no idea how this foreign girl got out here to his humble little store in the middle of nowhere. I ask for the bathroom and he does that thing where he doesn´t understand me just because he thinks he won´t be able to, but I am determined. I ask and ask and ask until he gets it. And then he tells me he doesn´t know. I look at him pleadingly, and he points "over there." I walk in that direction, stumbling in the dark, until I reach what looks like a shed with half a door. It´s so dark that I can´t see inside, but I know that whatever it is, it will have to pass for a bathroom.

I can´t do it.

It´s so dark.

I go back to the bus, sit for a few minutes, and manage to work up the courage to go back over there and try to pee over a hole in the dark. I go back and pee, but who knows if I made it into the hole...

Back on the bus. Lights are instantly turned out again and the Cumbia CD is replaced by Disco. Blaring Disco. I´m talking the Bee Gees and ABBA. I´m talking horrible songs that I didn´t know even existed. Then, we turn onto a dirt track and the sound of the windows, seats, luggage, EVERYTHING rattling is almost loud enough to drown out the music. I am thankful.

I´m also thankful that I brought ear plugs. I put them in, and although I can still hear the music, and the rattling, it´s softer now. Against all odds, I fall asleep.

Did I mention that the recline function on my seat is kind of broken? Of course it would be, right? It reclines, and it goes back quite far, but after a few minutes of bumping along dirt roads, it slowly but surely returns to its upright position. Amazingly, with my whole body buried in my sleeping bag, I am still able to sleep. And it´s not that bad.

I´m woken by a tap tap tap on my shoulder. I pull the sleeping bag and eye mask from over my face to see a police man standing over me and shinning a flash light into my eyes, even though the lights in the bus are on (???). I pull out my ear plugs. He asks for my passport. I pull a wad of documents from the pouch around my waist and he takes them all before I can sort through them and hand him my passport. He asks me a series of yes or no questions, based on the documents I am carrying. I ask the woman next to me if this is normal. I think she pretends that she doesn´t understand, as it seemed that she didn´t want to say anything in front of the police officer. The police woman harassing the drowsy people in the row in front of us tells me that we are at a check point, this is normal, and we will be arriving in Tarija shortly. Ok.

Out the window I see a city in the valley below us, lighting up the vast Bolivian emptiness. It must be Tarija. I decide to stay awake and watch our barely lit surroundings turn from rural to urban as we snake into the valley.

What an interesting bus ride. It wasn´t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

Besitos,
Allie