Escape from La Paz

Breaking out is impossible . . . breaking in is insane!




Ok, so as Siobhán may have mentioned in her last post, we had discovered that getting to our intended next destination may be a little more difficult that expected. Political unrest in Bolivia meant that there were a series of strikes taking place and wild fire political action to block roads as the result of disagreement between the newly gas rich states and the rest over President Morales plan to more evenly distribute the wealth to help the indigenous poor.

Never the less, we were not to be deterred and so it was your favourite, daring globe trotters booked their tickets, packed their bags and made their way to the bus office (carrying their own bags and everything, not a porter or concierge in sight!)

Following a 20 minute wait, we were asked to follow the lady from the office to the bus. Now we assumed having been asked to meet at the bus office it may be somewhere near by, at least in the same postal code. This was clearly a foolish assumption on our part as we walked so far across town with our bags, that we were beginning to wonder if the company's cunning plan to get by any road blocks was simply for us to walk the entire way.

Eventually, a bus, or something that at least resembled a bus did appear and we were ushered inside. Now I believe my beloved mentioned in her last post, that the last bus smelt rather unfortunately of the toilet. This little problem was not to be repeated as the bus company had come up with a brilliant solution for the four hour journey, no toilet!
I accept this may not seem like an end of the world situation, but I have yet to mention that we may have been experiencing slightly upset stomachs since we entered Bolivia, possibly related to the world class cuisine we had come to endure.

The journey to La Paz that followed, continued fairly uneventfully, with the only event of note being at a gas station the bus took a 15 minute break at, where a Japanese gentleman travelling on our bus thought it would be a good idea to light up a cigarette whilst wandering around the petrol pumps.

Once arriving at the vast sprawl that was La Paz, the bus company had one final cost saving measure up their sleeves, which consisted finding a more suitable venue to park than the bus station. The chosen venue was a practically vertical hill, which doubled up as one of the busiest roads in La Paz and barely big enough for a car to fit down, let alone squeeze past a parked bus on. Fortunately our bags were quickly off the bus and Siobhán managed to fight her way past the thronging crowd and launch herself into the only cab visible in the entire street, much to the consternation of some of our fellow passengers.

Before long we had made our way to the next hotel, The Ritz (what? we deserved a little luxury after the bus!)

The next 5 days were to be spent in La Paz. We had clearly not thought this entirely through. La Paz doubled up as both gastronomically bleak and something of an entertainment free zone, but it was not done messing with us there! We had a plan to travel through Bolivia and on into Brazil, but had not booked our onward travel. It turns out it's even harder to leave La Paz than to enter it and our options boiled down to a propable combination of several very slow bus and train journeys, likely to total around 30 hours through the eastern states that were currently the centre of the troubles. Indeed by the time we needed to leave 9 people had been murdered and the President was trying to arrest the leaders of the troublesome state.

With all of this in mind we decided to fly out of Bolivia, but even this seemed practically impossible, with no international flights out of La Paz, forcing we either fly all the way back to Peru, or go via Santa Cruz (capital of the problem state) which we were kindly informed by the sales assistant in the travel office was occasionally taken over by the protesters.

Well, to be honest things weren't as bad as I enjoy making them sound and we decided that our best route of escape would be to add Argentina into our itinerary and we made the necessary arrangements to fly into Salta, followed by Buenos Aires, which would make it straight forward to carry onto one of our intended destinations of Iguazu.

The day to leave came and in the mean time we had bought a painting. We needed to visit the art gallery on the morning we were to leave and so headed back to the gallery to finish the paper work and organise shipping. Upon nearing the gallery it turned out we were walking straight into an organised rally against the gas rich states. To make things more fun it transpired that the march was to continue straight past our hotel and so it became a race to see who would make it there first, us or the march. It turns out it was pretty much a tie, leading to us being escorted from the hotel to a back street where they had organised for a taxi ready to make it out to the airport.

Alright, if I'm honest I'm making it all sound far more exciting and dangerous than it really way, but after all you wouldn't want to read a dull blog!

[btw click here if you don't understand the picture / tag line]