More adventures in transport!

They say bad things happen in threes and, after leaving my memory card in the internet cafe in Sucre, it didn't take long for the next two things to follow...

When I arrived at the bus station to get my comfy cama (bed) bus to La Paz, I was informed that the cama bus was broken and I'd have to get a semi-cama. Now, these are quite comfy, but not ideal for an overnight trip. Despite not getting a lot of sleep, the journey passed uneventfully. I was quite jealous of the child who was sleeping on a blanket in the aisle as she looked much comfier than me! At least I wasn't in the luggage compartment or hadn't found my seat had been double booked so that I had to sit in the aisle, neither had I reached my seat to find it covered in vomit. These are not speculations, these things have actually happened on buses in Bolivia.

At about 6.30 am, the bus stopped and the driver came upstairs to give us all some information. From my basic Spanish I gathered that there was a blockade and we couldn't go any further. I'd spotted that there were some British people a couple of rows ahead of me so I went to ask them if they knew what was going on. I was correct, there was a road block and the driver had informed us that we'd have to walk the rest of the way into La Paz. He said that we were only 3km away and, if we wanted to leave our bags, they would get to La Paz the next day. Kerry, Karen and Colm asked if I wanted to walk with them so, grabbing our back packs (there is no way we were risking leaving them), we started off on our trek.

After about 45 minutes we stopped for a break, and to find a wall to hide behind to go to the toilet (I forgot to mention that there was no toilet on the semi-cama bus for our 12 hour journey). We then set off again stopping every 45 minutes for a 10 minute break. Kerry is in the army so kept us organised and motivated. The longer we walked, the more I mentally ran through the contents of my, increasingly heavy, back pack working out what I really could have survived without!

After walking for about 4 hours (and roughly 10km) we finally reached the other side of the blockade where we managed to get a, massively overpriced, taxi to our hostel! Unfortunately, check in wasn't until 2pm so I had to hover around the hostel, tired, smelly and a little grumpy for three hours before I could finally collapse on my bed! On the upside, the hostel did provide a free glass of beer in the evenings and pancakes for breakfast (it's the only reason I was staying there).

La Paz was much as I imagined, very busy. Still, we mooched around there for a few days and were amazed at the health and safety measure of having people dressed as zebras to assist pedestrians with crossing the road.

We went to the witches' market one day to browse the selection of dried llama fetus. I considered buying one for my sister as a wedding present (you bury it under the doorstep for good luck), but decided that I probably wouldn't get it through customs! We also visited the Coca Museum and the World Press Photo Exhibiton which was fascinating, thought-provoking and somewhat depressing.

As we were walking back, and commenting that La Paz didn't seem too unsafe, I glanced down to realise there was a hand sized slit in my handbag (which had been clasped under my arm the whole day). Fortunately, my camera and my wallet were in my pockets and, when I checked when I got back to the hostel, all that was missing was my camera case!

After this event, we were looking forward to escaping the city for the jungle...