La Paz and Bolivia Bus Adventure #1
Trip Start
Sep 12, 2008
1
18
Trip End
Dec 19, 2008
La Paz, Bolivia
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
-People are more "tranquilo", which means they generally left us to our own devices and didn't bombard us trying to sell us every imaginable thing. If I walked into a store and looked around and walked out, no one really blinked an eye.
-We no longer had the feeling we were being used by the government to pay off the national debt (or their own pockets perhaps) because tourist attractions were moderately priced and not over-hyped or over-sold.
-Buses are crazy, people are down to earth and social issues are more in your face which gave the trip more of a traveling feel than a sightseeing feel.
So I liked Bolivia instantly and felt the same throughout our short 2 weeks there.
But on to buses: I had heard that Bolivian buses were crazy but needed to really experience the craziness to understand it. And experience it I sure did. Here is bus adventure #1:
Copacabana-La Paz:
The bus from Puno to Copacabana was basically a tourist shuttle because in my experience of Latin America, other people don't really cross borders unless they have a very good reason for it. So we had a nice time in the bus, swapping travel stories and horror stories until Copacabana, where some people got off but about 6 of us stayed on to La Paz. Most of the tourists had little or no spanish so I ended up acting like a translator on the bus a couple times. A little after sunset we suddenly stopped beside the lake and everyone got off the bus (except the confused tourist gang). I managed to gather and relay that we had to leave the bus and cross the lake separately in boats.
Actually, the conversation was "Why do we need to get off the bus?" -"The lake"... "Oh. ok".
So we got off the bus and the tourists followed me around in the dark and cold like lost sheep as I tried to figure out what was happening and where we needed to be. We managed to get tickets for the little boats that were going across, as our bus (with our backpacks!) boarded a barge that looked basically like a few planks of wood stuck together. I believe the tires of teh bus were under water sometimes.
We got in the little boat and thought things were grand and exciting until discovering that the lake had very big waves and that the front window was in fact not a window. So we froze and hung on as the boat sped and rocked across the narrow part of lake to the other side. When we landed we couldn't see the bus so we hypothesized that it had drowned, until it mysteriously pulled up from who knows where 15 minutes later and we hopped on to continue the ride (trying to act as unfazed as the locals).
All in a day's bus ride in Bolivia.
