5 Days in a Bus

After 10 long days of being stuck in Paraguay, Erin and I finally received our temporary passports (woohoo!) on Monday afternoon, Feb. 9. The timing was ideal because earlier that day we had sunk to a new low out of sheer bordem and desperation: we went to see Kianu Reeves´ new-ish alien movie, ¨the day the earth stood still.¨ In our defense, we had seen every other possible movie, besides the children´s movies which are dubbed in Spanish, and I hate to admit, those were next. (A typical day in Asuncion... here I am saving seats for us)

Itching to get out of Asuncion, (or what my dad has cleverly re-named, ¨itsucksion¨) we promptly got on a bus for Bolivia at 7:30pm that evening. But this was all too easy... about two hours into the bus ride, of course our bus broke down in ¨the middle of nowhere¨, Paraguay. We stopped on the highway where the bus conductors began to work on the engine at the back. We knew it was a hopeless situation when after a while, we saw that the bus crew was asleep in the lower luggage compartments. The bus was way too hot, stuffy, and smelly to sit or sleep in, so for the first several hours some of us passengers layed on the highway watching fireflies, listening to frogs and insects, and I was convinced I smelled snakes. However, we were massacred by swarms of mosquitos, and right now happens to be the worst outbreak of Dengue fever that Paraguay has seen in 22 years... so we chose death by sweltering bus over death by mosquitos. Babies cried, mosquitos infiltrated through the few cracked windows, everyone was wet with sweat, and Erin got kicked in the head by the woman behind her. We spent about 7 hours on the highway that night before the replacement bus showed up at dawn.

We made it to the Paraguayan immigration post later that day. Thank god our temporary passports (which were missing Paraguayan visas, remember, the visas we never purchased) still got us past immigration on account of us being ¨linda¨ (pretty), according to the very professional officers. Out bus continued on the ¨highway¨, which was actually a bumpy dirt road, toward Bolivia, stopping frequently for the bus driver to tamper with the sub-par engine of bus #2.

Sometime in the afternoon, our bus stopped in the road, this time oddly not due to mechanical problems, but because there was an animal on the road. A handful of people got out of the bus after the driver, including our curious selves, to see what was going on. The driver approached the animal, and I suppose we thought he was either going to help it or at least move it off the road; however, Erin and I watched on in horror as he dragged this big dead pig by the hoof towards the bus. He loaded the carcass (with its innards hanging out) into the lower compartment of the bus with our luggage, saying something about not wanting to waste ¨good meat.¨ Erin and I borded the bus in shock, laughing in disbelief that our coach bus just picked up road-kill. (The bus driver dropped the pig off later to his buddy for meal prep)

After we crossed the Bolivian border, our bus continued to break down regularly, and we´d stop for an hour or so for the conductors to fiddle with the engine, and then we´d be on our way again. We arrived in Santa Cruz, Bolivia at 7:00am on Wednesday morning, desperate for water, food, showers, and real sleep. Of all the bus rides we´ve been on this entire trip, even the chicken buses of central america, this was by far the worst one yet. But we were troopers, and it´s hard to complain when there´s a 6-month-pregnant woman with her 3 year old son sitting in the seat next to you.

So what did we do the following day? Well we got on another bus headed for Uyuni, Bolivia, but this time the bus ride was only 28 hours. There was no paved road the entire way, mostly just rocky, bumpy, dusty roads winding back and forth up and down through the mountains and valleys of Bolivia, at the speed of a jogger. It was so rough that during the night the bus driver actually stopped the bus to throw up for about 10 minutes. And at one point we were driving over freshly fallen landslide debris... But there is something to be said for the Bolivian landscape; it´s absolutely stunning. We drove through the river valleys of huge mountains covered in lush green jungle vegetation with deep red soil, then through rolling hills of countryside with plots of farmland divided by waiste-high rock walls, then through huge rocky mountains, plataus, and canyons with a sparse desert landscape of sand, rocks, shrubs, and cacti. We passed by a lot of alpaca and goat herds as well. Besides the few bigger cities, many of the small towns in Bolivia are isolated and scattered through the vast landscape. All of the houses and structures are either made from red brick or mud/clay brick. The beautiful, interesting scenery made the bumpy ride a little better. Also on this journey, we were both feeling a little tired, light-headed, and were short of breath. And Erin was very naucious. It was later when we got to Uyuni that we were told we had been in the highest city in the world that day, Potosi, and Uyuni is is not far behind it. Turns out were were feeling the effects of altitude.