6:00 AM Friday:
Board a bus in Uyuni, Bolivia headed for the border.
Keep in mind that Bolivian roads are not paved so that we get to experience the joys of off-roading through the Bolivian desert and mountains (Think Thunder Mountain Railroad, Disneyland).
11:00 AM Friday:
Bolivia. Stop for one hour. Trekk across town for a bathroom. Return to bus via shortcut. Wait, is that a dirty diaper on the ground? Pigs eating trash? Looks like our shortcut was really a walk through a dump.
12:00 PM Friday
As we make hairpin turns around switchbacks and whip along the narrow mountain ridges, solid ground is not visible from our second-level window. In our minds (aka just Monica's) we pray that we somehow don't roll right off the cliff like we (aka Monica, again) have read about in so many Internet horror stories about Bolivian buses. In this case, ignorance is bliss. Christina is not freaking out at all. We finally get comfortable and can pretend to sleep. As soon as this happens it starts to rain and we hope that the bus can handle slippery mud around the hairpin turns and mountain ridges. Next hail. Next snowstorm. Does this bus have anti-lock breaks?
2:00 PM Friday:
Arrive in Tupiza to change buses. Our bus is so late from our perilous journey that our next bus is practically rolling away and just waiting to close the doors until we hop on.
3:00 PM Friday:
Arrive in Villazon, Bolivia. We find fellow travelers who have gone this route before so they know how to direct us to the border, about 0.5 mile with our huge backpacks. We are so happy to finally reach the border.
We walk to Imagracion Bolivia, and get our departure stamps 45 minutes later. We think we are set to get our stamp into Argentina and be on our merry way.
Midway to the other side, Christina faceplants on the sidewalk. Thank God for the front and back padding (small backpack in front, large in back). Knee scraped, ego bruised. That was embarassing.
3:45 PM Friday
We go to get in line for the Imagracion Argentina office, but they point us back to the Bolivian border, to a long line snaking across a bridge. Fantastic.
We wait in a stagnant line. Seriously, this thing did not move. It was a true turtle on crutches (for all you loyal blog followers, you will understand this reference.)
And cue the rain. Because it fell on us for the next 2 hours, as the line did not move. Its a good thing our rain ponchos were buried deep down in our packs. No way they would be accesible without us taking the entire contents of our bags out on the wet cement/dirt.
We finally get our stamps, and are completely drenched. Next stop, baggage declaration - aka another stagnant line. We finally get to the front, where the cute Seguridad has the opportunity to search our bags. Lovely, we have bags of dirty laundry in there. They also look at Christina's Trader Joe's dried, flattened bananas as though they are some sort of drug cartel. Of course, Christina forgets all relevant Spanish vocab and stares at them dumbfounded.
We finally get through baggage inspection, and ask where the nearest casa de cambio is, because we have no Argentinan pesos to pay for our cab. "Casa de cambio? En Bolivia." Andddd back to Bolivia we go.
7:00 PM Friday:
We finally make it across to Argentina and grab a cab to the bus station so we can book our bus to Salta, Argentina. Nothing to worry about, because we were lucky enough to book a bus in 2 hours! We were starving by this time since we had nothing to eat since 5:30AM, so we found a nearby restaurant for some lomitos. Luckily, we ran into our bus friends who ordered us some lomitos and fries and then acted puzzled as to why we were sitting down to this meal 30 minutes before our bus departed. What?! Oh..time change. We scarf down two lomitos and fries before we threw some money on the table and ran back to the bus station to catch our 9:00 pm bus
Oh the bus station. In the rain. Crowded with locals, babies set sleeping on the ground, dogs and gigantic satchels of who knows what taking over the tiny overhang shielding the terminal from the pouring rain. Oh the smell.
9:15 PM Friday:
9:15 rolls around, then 9:30 and our bus pulls into the lot. A mad rush of local women run to the side of the bus and start chucking their giant satchels into the storage compartment before the bus driver could even sort them. Cool. No room for our bags. I guess we will just hold them on our laps for 12 hours.
At least we know they will be safe.
We get on and there was more chucking and throwing. Locals stuffing clothes, food, mysterious satchels in any open space or corner they could find. Only to relocate and switch the location of their things randomly and sneakily throughout the ride. Many people standing over us or sleeping on the floor of the aisle.
Thirty minutes after departure we stop and several people get off. Oh...this was a local bus...and the first stop of many. At least we can get some sleep finally. Monica falls asleep instantly yet Christina was too weirded out to shut her eyes. she finally fell asleep for a few minutes and was woken up to an empty bus and an officer yelling and throwing a woman's bag off the bus. The woman begging on her knees and saying something about her papers. she runs to pick up her child who was asleep on a pile of clothing on the floor of the bus and pleads some more. whatever she said worked. Meanwhile Monica was still sleeping and wakes up when the commotion stops. Apparently we were both asleep when the bus was stopped, evacuated and searched and for some reason no one woke us up. We must have looked like little angels.
2:00 AM Saturday:
More stops, more shifting of personal items, more people on the floor and changing places and we finally made it to Jujuy at 2AM. We check our tickets and realize we have three and one-half hours to kill in an outdoor bus station in the middle of the night in Jujuy. No way were we falling asleep there. We sat there in our zombie state for a few more hours where we made friends with some Poles and Australians who were just as weirded out as us.
5:30 AM Saturday:
Finally, our bus to Salta appears and we finally feel comfortable enough to sleep because the bus was almost empty except for our Polish and Australian companions.
8:30 AM Saturday
We slept for the 4 hour bus ride so happy to finally reach our final destination after our 26 hour journey. Can we mention how pretty we looked at this point? Cherry on top: Monica lost her iPhone, which contained all of the photos of the snow/hail storm, crazy cliffs and people of our journey. RIP.
For your viewing pleasure since we lost all of the photos of our journey on Monica's iPhone:
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