The Journey to La Paz

I realize I haven't updated this in a little while, and I should try to keep up to date more, and have to upload a million pictures, but I only have a little bit of time and I think the journey from Uyuni to La Paz deserves an entry all of itself... (even though there are other memorable bus rides that will be mentioned later...)

So like I mentioned in the end of the last entry, we arrived at Uyuni and had to wait until 8pm for the bus. Like idiots, we didn't wait until all the agencies were opened (it was like 12:30 when we arrived, and the majority would reopen at 2pm), we just bought our tickets in the first one we found, for 80 bolivianos, which seemed like a reasonable price, even though it meant we'd have to change buses in Oruro, at the ungodly hour of 3am... but alright, we really just wanted to get the hell out of there.

Time comes for the bus, and our Canadian friends from the Salar tour were actually coming part of the journey with us, only until Oruro, where they would take another bus to Cochabamba. They only paid 40 bolivianos (which is important info, will tell you why in a sec.)

The journey begins, and we immediately feel like we've been trapped inside an earthquake simulator, or something of the sort. No joke. The road was the worse thing I've seen so far, and the entire bus (which wasn't that new) was rattling and shaking like a blender... To make matters worse, there wasn't just the number of people that could fill the seats... there was much more! You know those buses you see in movies, with the chickens and the children and everything else mixed in?? Well, there were no chickens (or at least that I saw... but I made sure to close my eyes very quickly and ignore everything...) but it was kinda like that... people sitting on the floor, trying to sleep on the floor, filling the isles and every possible space...

Luckly, both Mene and I can sleep through anything, so that's what we did... turn towards the window, away from the crowd, and sleep....

Eventually, we made a stop, somewhere around midnight I think, and woke up, looked behind at our Canadian friends to see how they were doing, and the poor girl, Angie, she had been throwing up out the window nonstop for the last 4hrs or so... and Matt, her husband, could barely keep it down. They couldn't believe we had slept through the whole thing...

After that, we had a paved road, so it was better... until we stopped at 3am in Oruro.

In Oruro, we expect to change buses directly and leave to La Paz, but that's where we discover that we don't actually have tickets to La Paz, that the bus company we came with doesn't go all the way there, and the bus driver was walking around with us behind him, trying to find us tickets. Detail: there were people yelling around the platforms "La Paz, 15 bolivianos to La Paz..."

That's where we realized we'd just been screwed and the bus driver used our 40 bolivianos to buy tickets for 15 bolivianos and give them to us, and put us on the bus. Oh well... it happens...

At least we made it to La Paz, the second bus was on paved road and not overcrowded, and incredibly, it was on time. We arrived at La Paz at 7am on the dot, where we stayed at the bus terminal for only a couple of hours, while waiting for our next bus, which would take us to Copacabana, on Lake Titicaca...

And that's on another entry... :)