According to the airline company, we are currently stranded 400km from La Paz due to the plane being – stop me if this gets too technical – 'Broken' unfortunately they have no real idea when the plane will be 'Fixed'. You didn't think there would be more than one plane did you?
Our options are limited; wait six days for a good quality bus (which takes 10hrs), take the daily local bus (20hrs, breakdown guaranteed at no extra cost) or hire a jeep. The night bus is not going to happen as we are short of money and the town has no ATMs, the local bus is last on the list as I have no wish to sit with a chicken on my lap for the day – that would be foul (bu-dum-tish), so the only real contender is to hire a jeep and driver and make our own way South. As we are not the only people in this predicament we are travelling with Geoff and Jenney, who have been on the tour with us for the last week and we know are good fun to travel with. We then found an Australian couple who need to get to La Paz – although after talking to him for ten minutes we are not sure if he is a medical student or a serial killer. We may need to put him on the roof.
We gave our driver thorough instructions 'La Paz!' and we were off. Ciara's Spanish is coming along much better than mine, but it was left to me along some of the more precipitous cliff tops to translate 'Slow down or feel my size nines in your backside' as we felt her saying 'Slow down or feel my size twos in your backside' did not carry the same level of threat.
With the mountainous dirt roads completed we thought the worst was over and started to relax – except perhaps Geoff, who had picked the front seat and was currently on his twelfth pack of Marlboro's having only started smoking today. Our tranquility was short lived as we gained altitude and the fog cut the visibility down to about two metres – at least on the dirt roads we could see our impending doom this was like being Steve Wonder left on a runway at Heathrow. After an hour we descended into La Paz thankful that our driver was obviously on a promise that night.
We never did quite work out which side of the road we were supposed to be driving on, it seems that in the cities and towns the cars drive on the left but in the mountains they drive on the right. But where does the town road become a mountain road? You may well ask.
1 comment:
Rich,
Ciara linked one of your posts in from facebook, and I've managed to read a couple of them aloud to Jennay. She is in the top bunk (Montevideo) and laughing her (lack of) balls off. I think i'm going to pour myself a glass of whatever piss beer they make here and continue on with the rest of the January posts. Looking forward to future writings with lines such as "After lunch we sailed back to Rurrenabaque feeling more tired than a Jennifer Aniston script and sweating like a suicide bomber in sheepskin trousers." Classic.
Post a Comment