Claire takes on the world….

Long story, but it was a long day.

Most days I have on the road are fun. I get up, figure out where I am and what time it is, and then it’s 12 hours of thinking of things to do, places to see and finding food to eat. Us travellers have our own worries and stresses though, but no matter how bad things get, we can’t complain. If we attempt a complaint, we get hit with a “I’m working 40 hours a week, you’re travelling the world” kind of line.

So in the absence of a sympathetic ear, I am going to tell my blog all about the trouble myself and Jenny had getting from Bolivia to Chile. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Jenny is the 18 year old whipper snapper I first met in Peru when she moved into the apartment Michael and I had been sharing. We worked together for a month then she returned to the mean streets of Belfast. Six months later she followed her boyfriend to Brazil where I found her and we took off across Bolivia.
Now our time in Bolivia was up, I had to get to Santiago, the capital of Chile, to catch a flight to Australia and she had a flight back to Brazil, en route to the Emerald Isle.
So this day I am about to complain about started with a 3.30am bus to the border. The early morning wake up call was probably the most fun thing we did. The driver obviously wanted to show off that he had air conditioning so he fired it up full steam, so we shivered all the way to Chile.

We rolled up to the immigration office at around 8am, I was just about awake enough to realise something dodgy was going on. The guards were demanding 15 Bolivianos from everyone to get their departure stamp. I was fairly confident no other border in Bolivia demanded this so I decided to use my shiny new Spanish skills. I believe the encounter went something like this:

“Hello, I would like a departure stamp”
“That will be 15 Boliviano m’am”
“Ok fine, but I’ll need a receipt”
“We don’t do receipts”
“Well then I won’t be paying”
“Then you won’t be leaving the country”

At this stage I launched in to a big grammatically incorrect speech on how no one else has to pay this, and these guys were criminals. Then I had a brainwave, I told them I was on business and my boss wouldn’t reimburse me unless I had a receipt. That angle didn’t sway them so I very begrudgingly paid. I was holding up the already terribly long queue. I insulted them so many times I probably should have been arrested – but the stamp is a lovely multi coloured one so I guess it was worth the €1.50

Back on the bus we took off towards the Chilean border, a half mile or so down the road. Here Jenny’s day took a turn for the worse. We had a system where one of us jumped off the bus first and got our bags while the other one collected up the things we had scattered around the bus. This time we had Jenny getting luggage while I ran to the new bus to get us seats. I never really heard the story of what went wrong there but she had an extremely stressful time getting the luggage, I believe she had to use her elbows a lot to get my stuff, and it was a beetroot version of Jenny that turned up on bus number 2.

The new bus driver needed everybody’s name and details. On a bus overflowing with bodies this was no pleasant task, so he started shouting down and people would shout back the answers. At one stage he asked Jenny where she was from and she shouted back,

“Ireland, Northern Ireland”
When it came my turn he asked,
“You Northern Ireland too?”
“Eh,no, I’m from the south.”

This earned us a big “Woooooo” from our fellow passengers, these guys are well up on current affairs.

Another few metres down the road the bus stopped again, this time for the Chilean immigration. The driver reprimanded me for stepping out of line in the queue, Jenny figured he had Little Man Syndrome (being super authoritative to make up for being small). This made me feel a little better about being given out to like a schoolgirl.

After getting our stamp we though we were home and dry. Little did we know we had around 4 hours of standing in the desert heat before we’d be allowed back on the bus. Everything had to be taken out. The bus was so full that to get to my seat I had to jump over bags, that were on other bags, with a few old ladies on top. The boot and bus we really about as full as they could be, and now everything was going go be absolutely thoroughly searched.

It was like in an airport when hand luggage gets searched, except it was every single bag. We saw racism at its worse that day. First the 8 or so foreigners had their own line, because you know, we don’t like to wait. Then the blonde girls got their bags patted down and a few things were taken out while the dark guy with the beard had absolutely everything, opened, poked and pulled apart.

The immigration people had been walking up and down the queue for hours asking us questions and getting us to fill out forms. Under no circumstances were we to bring anything made from animal products into the country, or drugs by the way, but that one didn’t concern me. I did however have three tins of chocolates I had selected in Bolivia. These were great chocolates, second only to Baroliche chocolate in Argentina. I couldn’t possibly part with them. Jenny had been urging me for a while to just dump them, chocolate smuggling was not something I wanted to go to jail for. When we took our spots in the special queue I was sweating piggy-style and my heart did that skipping a few beats every couple of beats thing. I thought about taking out the chocolate and sharing it amoungst the people there; at this stage it was lunch time and we had no food and no local currency to get any. But the cocolates were staying safe in their tins.

I decided to go for it. Jenny stepped up to the plate and had her blonde girl search. She later divulged her secret; see Jenny also had a tin of chocolate, but was less worried than I was because she‘s blonde and it was really far down her bag. When she tried to get her bag on the search table she dropped it. The officer took it from her and eased it onto the table. To which she gasped “Wow, so strong”. Well played Jennifer! After that he was too happy to care, he proded her pack a bit and she was on her way.

Next up it was my turn. Having brown hair I wouldn’t have much luck playing cute. So I went down the old tried and trusted ‘make conversation’ road in a bid to sneak my chocolate into Chile. I figured if we were buddies he’d never take my food. First he rummaged through the clothes I had worn in the jungle and had as of yet not found a place to wash them, then he found my dirty underwear and then finally I heard him hit tin. He hit it a few times to try and figure out what it was before he pulled it out of my case.

“So you’ve got some chocolate”
“Eh….oh that? Oh yea, I have some chocolate……it’s for my mother”
“Ah great! I hope she enjoys it”

And that was it, after hours of panic and trying to decide what to do. Finally, after 7 hours of immigration fun we were finally on our way to Chile!

The bus chugged off to a cheer. Literally 100 metres later it stopped and the driver announced it was lunch time. Everyone protested. I hopped off and took a photo of where we had set off from and where we had stopped to prove their proximity. During the lunch hour Jenny had yet more fun being a vegitarian in South America. When she asked for a tomato (tomate) she got tea (mate). Good to see 9 months in I still can’t communicate clearly. She ended up with a place of rice while I got stuck into some fine meat. This really is no place for animal lovers.

Back on the bus we were delighted to be moving again, we should have already been at our destination, but were told we had at least 5 hours left. 20 minutes down the road we were sailing along quite nicely until all of a sudden there was a big WHAM!

The bus had crashed in the middle of the desert. It swerved off the road and was now stuck in sand and leaning over about 45 degrees. I suddenly realised I no longer had my money bag or camera, but people a few seats up quickly handed them back to me, they had taken flight during the impact. I looked at the back of the bus and saw how we really were up on our side. I always thought I would be brave in a situation like this but the minute they started asking for men to jump out the windows and get us upright again I screamed.
“I’m strong! I can push the bus”

In fitting with how the day had been going so far, our window, aka our emergency exit was stuck, so I skipped up a few rows, over the a nice couple and jumped out their window. Once outside I realised how in the middle of nowhere we really were. There was another bus there, who had over taken our bus, startling our driver and sending us careering off the side of the road. They took off sheepishly leaving us stranded. We started helping all the other out the windows, the door was too deep in the sand to open it. The really crazy thing is once tragedy struck, all the contraband that had miraculously been snuck through Chilean customs came out. Whole handfuls of coca leaves were handed out the windows to calm people down. We squeezed into the tiny bit of shade we had while the others came up with a plan.

One of the Norwegians on board likened our situation to an episode of Lost. All that was missing was the water, natural food supply and good looking characters. All we had was sand, stones and blistering heat.

It was all fun and games at the start. The driver hitched a ride back to the border to get a truck. Said truck needed weight to pull the bus so we all hopped on the back and posed for crazy photos on a truck in the desert. Things got a little less funny when the truck drove off because we didn’t have enough money to pay him. We were suddenly left there, rationing water, with the real possibility of spending a night in what would be a freezing place at night-time.
Jenny made a friend in the madness, a Korean girl who had left the 1500km journey to Santiago right up to the last minute. She had 24 hours to get there or she’d miss her flight back home. We later lost her, never found out where she ended up…..

About 2 hours in I decided we had to do something, I asked the guy who looked like he was in charge why he didn’t reverse the bus out of the sand. I got a mixed answer, some said there was no reverse gear, some said the driver didn’t know how to reverse. So that was my bright idea shot down.

An even brighter person came up with a plan shortly after that. The new strategy involved collecting stones and building a road in the sand, so the next truck would be a bit more sucessful. First the bus would have to be freed a bit, and for this some people started digging. They dug until we had enough of a gap between the bus and sand to build our road.
We all set off, at this stage very much a team, finding rocks to bring back. the youngsters of the group loosened them in the ground so the adults, and Jenny, could pick them up and carry them back. Two and half hours after the crash, the new truck someone had found pulled us free. The crowd went wild and then piled into the bus. 18 hours after we had set off on our 9 hour jouney we finally made it to a bed.

So you see now, travelling is not all fun and games; we all have our bad days!

Tags: Bolivia, bus crash, Chile, Immigration

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 1:01 am and is filed under Bolivia, Chile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.