Travel Odyssey: I should have known, its Bolivia
I woke up on what was to be my last two days in Bolivia so looking forward to returning to La Paz so I could spend an entire day shopping for gifts for family and a charango for my cabin upstate, which has a small collection of unusual instruments. La Paz, in my not so extensive experience, is definitely the place to do your shopping.
It was going to be a good day, as we were going by, get this, PLANE to La Paz. Not bus, not train, not car.Oddly, and at the time I thought luckily, today was the first cloudy day we had had. Completely overcast, but not raining. I figured as good a day to travel elsewhere as any. Aero Sur was our choice of airlines for the day, as it was really either them or LAN, and LAN is pretty much international. We checked in, no problem, though Aaron notified us that the flight was going to be delayed because of weather. This floored me. What weather? Clouds? I mean it was the rainy season and it wasn’t even raining! What more did they want?
Our wait at the airport became hours of waiting. Finally, it started drizzling. 3 hours of waiting later, they canceled the flight. Yes folks, they cancelled the flight due to drizzle. Even though there was only 1 flight a day, instead of rescheduling it for a time later when it would invariably clear, they cancelled it fully, and notified us that there would be no available space to La Paz tomorrow or the next day. We were stuck, and we would miss our American Airlines flight home. However, we had a secondary plan. We could fly to Santa Cruz, where our original flight would make a pit stop and catch it there, giving us time to check out that city! American, in true asinine fashion, told us that because we were missing the first leg of a flight we already had, and had paid full price for I note, it was required to charge us for not providing us a portion of the service we had already paid for. I will make a point to complain to the airline directly. At the moment, in a crazy small airport with little options and a tenuous phone connection, we paid the fee.
Unfortunately we found out later that we couldn’t get a flight to Sucre either, for the next 3 days. This was just horrible. It meant a bus ride (13 hours! Over night, at least though), to Santa Cruz. And there was no way to get around it. It meant a)vacation was going to end in approximately 3 hours, b)no shopping time anywhere, c)another scary busride through the cliffs at night this time, d)no final night out with our gang and e)we’d have to pay for this pleasure, in both money and wasted, uncomfortable time.
Sucre Airport and Aero Sur completely suck. They canceled a flight over clouds. We spent nearly an hour on the phone with both our travel insurance and American Airlines. I can’t tell you how much this sucked. What a terrible way to end a very nice trip.Our group went back down to Sucre, Hannah and Aaron were going to be stuck here for a few more days, and Mark and I had a bus trip starting in about 3 hours. We had a last meal at Joyride, which was weighted down by how big a bummer this all was. Aaron tells me that we had more trouble with transportation than most. I believe him. Several broken down buses, a near wreck, and a canceled plane that couldn’t be replaced for days pretty much takes the cake.Ahhh. What can you do? Be Zen Jess.When we caught our bus it was sunny. I have never seen a more idiotic system. Some of the fortunate things: we saw our bags load, our seats were comfortable, hmmmm. That’s about it. Once we started going the scenery was back to unbelievably beautiful again, as we came down from the highlands into the jungle.As the sun set during the first two hours of our trip, my angst was relatively ameliorated as it was a nice way to see the countryside, and this was very different than the altiplano. But then it got dark and then the real trip started.My imagination does run away with me on these buses when I have too much time on my hands. The bus driver was actually driving slowly and responsibly, so instead of worrying about him, I decided to worry about the fact that we were in constant descent following hundreds of hairpin turns. It occurred to me that if the brakes fail (and man they were making very weird whiney sounds constantly!) we were going over one of the hundreds of cliffs and would fall 500+ feet into a ravine. I got this under control though, Zen Zen Zen.
Several hours of darkness in, I noticed that the driver had to stop twice and BACK UP, to avoid falling over the cliff as he hadn’t cut the turn correctly. THEN I started worrying about the driver. I sure did hope he stayed as awake and diligent as he had been so far. I adjusted my sleeping position and closed my eyes for a fitful 9 hours of sleeping.
After 13 hours on the bus we made our flight to Miami and our next flight to NYC. 27 hours later I was home.
Tags: , Bolivia, Bus, Flights, La Paz, Sucre, Tag Index
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