Yes I know the titles are getting worse, but this one is all about bus journeys - you see...BUS-ted? oh never mind, just read this...

South America is a big place and when you are travelling on the cheap you must take the bus. This means that the average journey is between 10 and 18 hours long and often overnight.

The majority of bus journeys in Argentina have been amazingly smooth with comfortable seats, regular "meals" (well the shrink wrapped cheese and ham sandwhiches were better than British rail's) and overnight comfort with only a few stops for people getting off and on in godforsaken places. All the buses have toilets which generally only smell a bit if you're silly enough to choose a seat next to them and the price is less than you would expect. However - our last bus journey out of Argentina and into Chile (whom -perhaps significantly- Argentinians are not too fond of) turned out to be a comedic sequence of disasters.

The bus departed at 6:30am. Jon had forgotten to go to bed the previous night and although he was already up, I STILL had to go into the kitchen to remind him about our departure time. Tired (Jon) and a little angry (me) we found ourselves on the bus as it departed on time. Our luck ended there. One hour out of town the bus stopped at the side of a major road. The driver and the driver's helper got out and and started fiddling about with the engine. Then they started sitting around as it slowly became obvious that we had to wait for the engineer to arrive from town.

Jon slept.

I read some of my book and chatted idly with a few people, and then yet another person started playing our guitar better than we can.

Jon slept.

The engineer arrived and tried to replace the broken part. It was the wrong one so he had to go back to town to get another one.

Jon STILL slept.

I went outside to sit on the grass with one or two other people where we actually started to enjoy ourselves and have some interesting chat while the french man continued to play our guitar better than we can (grr). THEN the bus got fixed and we all looked dubious as it spluttered into life, but boarded nonetheless. Only 4 hours of waiting and we were back on the road again.

Jon slept.

We soon sailed into the nearby town of Jujuy where the tv started to make a horrendous demonic noise followed by back to back videos of Phil Collins! Could it get any worse...? Well, yes it could. We had to traverse a high desert to reach our Chilean destination and as we climbed, the altitude made it harder to breathe. In the desert, we were driving down a rutted "road" and the dust permeated the bus and our nostrels accentuating the gagging action brought on by Phil Collins. Then a loud BANG behind me heralded a broken window at the rear with 2 tourists strewn with broken glass at which point we were all laughing (while choking on dust) and hoping that the "bad things come in 3's" theory would prove correct.

Well, border controls aside (which are ALWAYS a nightmare) the theory was correct and we arrived in San Pedro de Atacama in almost one piece, even though we were about 6 hours later than expected!

And so to the bolivian bus journey

We had heard that the bolivian buses were a nightmare and so were pleasantly suprised when our first bus within the country was of a reasonable standard and seemed to be getting us quite nicely to our destination. That is until - of course - we came to an abrupt halt behind a collection of other buses, cars and trucks somewhere around a mountain road. I had trouble understanding what was happening because people make stuff up and also talk very fast spanish. I got to the stage where I realised that there were rocks all over the road and that it may have been a demonstration. I also thought that clearance at 8:00pm was being bandied about (an hour away), but that was inaccurate. In fact, it WAS a demo (the reason for which we are still in the dark) and the perpetrators had thrown tons and tons of rocks onto the road over a distance of about 1km. It was not going to be cleared any time soon.

The driver of the bus went off to sort out what was to be done, leaving us sitting in the dark with loud radio static in an end-of-the-world style. An hour later he returned to tell us that we would have to take our luggage and walk to the other side of the blockade where another bus would be waiting for us. This seemed fair enough, but being at altitude meant that walking with a 20kg backpack for 1km in the dark while picking your feet through a rockstrewn road was a little harder than previously imagined, and when we met with some tourists coming the other way who told us that their bus had left w¡thout them and they were stranded, we had to pick up the pace somewhat.

Eventually, breathless and relieved, we found our bus which, suprisingly, knew we were coming and had waited for us, and we continued our journey without further incidence. We can't complain though, for 4 quid to get 100 km in relative safety it's a pretty good deal.

Addendum: For those concerned people out there, the other tourists whose bus left without them actually made it safely. (Their bus was just hiding behind a long line of other vehicles)