The 33 hour bus ride from La Paz to Salta turned out to be a bit of an adventure. I was taking the route right through the Andes to Potosí and on to Villazón on the Bolivian border with Argentina.
I was the only non-native person on the bus. With my fancy guitar case and camera, I couldn't have been more obvious. I made sure my single suitcase got loaded into the luggage hold and carried the guitar on board, stuffing it in the overhead rack. The bus was not even close to full, so I grabbed a window seat near the front in order to take photos as we ascended to El Alto on our way out of La Paz.
When we stopped in El Alto, I saw a flood of people waiting to board the bus. I was asked to move further to the rear and did so, leaving my camera laying in the seat I had vacated. I never saw it again.
By the time I realized it was missing, it was too late. The driver, to my great embarrassment, practically turned the bus upside down looking for the bloody camera, while I sat red faced in my seat in the middle aisles, wishing I had not even mentioned the damned camera. I only care about the lost pictures, not the camera. But alas....Here in El Alto, a robust Bolivian man with a leathery and darkly weathered face boarded and sat next to me. We exchanged greetings. He carefully jostled my guitar, which I had moved, to accommodate his own carry on bundles in the overhead rack, then settled into his seat. Several mothers with young children boarded, many ladies in bowlers and traditional garb, a few young rowdies with MP3 players and several rural men evidently returning home. A tall, beautiful and regal looking young Bolivian woman boarded, with flailing limbs in the crowded aisle parting like the Red Sea as she and her attractive female friend moved gracefully to the rear of the bus in their Patagonia-style designer gear.
We were soon on the road again, and as the sun descended, the weather turned colder by the minute. Within a few hours from La Paz, we were on dirt and intermittent gravel roads that we would follow for the duration to Villazón. My weathered seatmate had fallen fast asleep wrapped in his thick Bolivian wool blanket, his head resting on my shoulder as he snored contentedly. I could not sleep, and even with a sweater and a down jacket, I was already cold. By the time we got to Potosí about midnight, the lights of an illuminated hilltop cross glimmering in the near distance, my toes and fingers were starting to get numb.
We stayed about 15 minutes in Potosí, where the tall Patagonia girl and her friend got off. Potosí is famed for being the highest city in the world at nearly 13,500 feet, but it has a deep and colorful history, was once a wealthy Spanish mining town known worldwide for its riches. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site with about 135,000 inhabitants. It looked interesting, even passing through in the dead of night, surrounded by high mountains with narrow dirt streets and adobe style dwellings. I wish I had some time to spend here.
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The roads were a disaster at every turn. We were fording makeshift creeks that had washed out the road at various points and making twisting, agonizing high speed descents on roads not wide enough to accommodate two bicycles, let alone two buses or a bus and another vehicle.
There was no bathroom on the unheated bus. The ticket clerk in La Paz had assured me there was a lovely bathroom and sleeper seats. Sigh. Make the sale first. When you could no longer contain your overflowing joy, you simply notified the driver, who acted as if you simply did not exist, never mind your insistence that it was a medical emergency.
When enough passengers had served notice, typically at least 8 to 10, the driver might deign to stop if a flat space loomed ahead. And not at some nice facility. Just any old place. So you got the hell off the bus in the freezing cold and did your duty out in the weeds or behind the bus, modesty be damned. Luckily, I was well prepped by the previous month on the road. I felt right at home.
Before we left the terminal in La Paz, I had filled every pocket of my jacket with candy bars, packages of nuts, and chewing gum. I shared this booty with my seatmate and all the antsy kids and their grateful, beleaguered mothers in the surrounding seats before everyone fell asleep.
We stopped once for 30 minutes to eat in an outpost that looked like little more than a waystation for the buses plying this route. By the time I got to the head of the line, they were out of chicken and soup, so I made do with a bag of nuts and some hot tea, then used the community bathroom, where you filled a bucket with water from a large barrel and poured it into the toilet to flush. I handed off the bucket to the young mother waiting behind me.
By this time, people in my section of the bus were starting to recognize and acknowledge one another. I was the candy bar guy. A tiny glimmer of traveling brotherhood and sisterhood began to emerge; a nod of the head, a smile, something human to warm the heart in this icy weather.
We arrived at the border in Villazón in the freezing early morning. I was as stiff and cold as a block of ice, and my bag was one of the last to come out of the luggage hold as I stood shivering on the curb. Inside the tiny and crowded, but warm, bus station, I was told that I had to transfer to another bus with a different bus line on the Argentine side of the border. The clerk made me nervous by taking my passport and holding it for a long time before assigning a bicyclist to lead me on the long walk through Villazón's main street to the Argentine border. The cyclist abandoned me halfway to the border, a 15 to 20 minute walk. I was probably supposed to tip him.
There was a long line to get through customs into Argentina and a small cluster of young college kids, probably from the U.S., queued up on the other side of the street to get into Bolivia. They were carrying enormous backpacks and looked as if they'd been on the road a while. The Argentine border guard who inspected my papers, in his crisply pressed uniform, seemed disgruntled that my beat up old passport was dog earred. He spent considerable time smoothing out the corners and looking at me disapprovingly, but he finally stamped it, and I went through quickly afterwards.
I caught an old Peugeot taxi with a mellow, portly driver to the bus terminal in the sleepy but picturesque little town of La Quiaca on the Argentine side of the border. The clerk at the bus depot told me I had missed my connecting bus, so I had to buy another ticket for the second leg of the trip. I didn't necessarily trust him, but I coughed up the money.
The Salta bus didn't leave until 4 pm, so I walked all over La Quiaca. The entire town seemed shut down, almost like a ghost town, but I finally found a bustling little restaurant packed with locals, with one animated group at a large banquet table having an informal lunch meeting amid shards of conversation about local political affairs. I ate a delicious lunch of potato soup, mixed salad (ensalada mixta) and roasted chicken. I treated myself to a beer to wash it all down and then lingered over coffee and pastry for another 30 minutes before ambling back to the bus station bathed in glorious afternoon sunshine.
The bus to Salta was a luxury liner compared to the Villazón bus. Reclining seats, only about half full, an on board restroom. It felt like the Ritz, although I missed the vibe from the people on the Bolivian bus. We pulled into the bus station at Salta in the dark of night, and I caught a taxi to my hotel. Michael had very thoughtfully, and in his usual thorough manner, made a reservation for me.
I had a late dinner at, of all places, a Bavarian beer cafe next to the hotel, with a bunch of rowdy locals singing and carrying on while noshing bratwurst and quaffing pints of Schneider lager.
It is good to be back in Argentina, but inside of me, beautiful La Paz is still calling.
