Escape from Rurre at last
Trip Start
Feb 06, 2007
1
228
330
Trip End
Jan 14, 2008
Riberalta, Bolivia
Friday, October 5, 2007
We arrived at the terminal at the agreed 7am and said 'we're here'. Żou want to buy tickets ?'. 'No, we've got them'. Disbelief. We had to show our tickets and point out our names on their list. The bus had arrived from La Paz, full, no room for the likes of us except 2 seats right at the back. We left at 7.20, did a circuit of Rurre to the service fstation, and sat there or 2 hours. There was no diesel. A guy roared off on a motor bike and came back with 40 litres, then another 40 litres (how far can a bus go on 80 litres ?). Then Magic happened. The service station found some diesel, so the bus filled up, and we set off back to the terminal to collect the La Paz passengers who would have been waiting there for some 3 hours by now. When we finally got going it was 10.45, nearly 4 hours late.
The road to Santa Rosa was hideous, dusty and full of potholes that shook those of us on the back seat to pieces. In the compartment underneath us was a huge gas cylinder, which rolled from side to side with regular loud crashes. We feared for our backpacks, needlessly as it turned out. After Santa Rosa and a miserable lunch of overcooked fish and burnt rice the road improved, but it still shook a spring out of the bus's suspension. The guys jacked the bus up, took a hammer and whacked it back into place, then found a roll of bus-size mending tape to glue the whole lot together.
Onward for a few hours and we started pulling up at a restaurant. 'Vamos, va-mos, va-mos'chorussed the entire population of the bus (let's go), 'Vamos', but stop we did, the bus was jacked up again, and the spring hammered back again.
The bus trundled into Riberalta at 1.10am. Our packs had been rolling in the dust for 18 hours, and looked it. Barb's brand new pale shirt was teak-coloured from the dust pouring in through the ill-fitting window, Pete's hair had changed to carrot-colour from almost white. An army of motor bikes was waiting to taxi the passengers. Not a sight of a hotel nearby, so we had no choice but to hop on 2 bikes, backpacks perched on the handle bars, to our chosen hotel near the plaza. It was full, or the night porter couldn't be bothered opening the gate. He vaguely waved us down the street, where we found a street light and peered at Lonely Planet. Our next choice no longer existed, but the last effort before settling down in the dusty plaza for the night found us a sauna of a room full of mossies but with a nice bed.
