Three Buses, Two Taxis, a Boat, a Sean and a Gerald
It’s easy to complain about busses in South America. There’s loud and endless movies, the bumpy roads, the weird smells.
We’ve taken our fair share of shitty busses in the past three months but I think our trip from Arequipa, Peru to La Paz, Bolivia takes the cake. It started at 10:30 PM on a Tuesday and ended at 8:30 PM on a Wednesday. Twenty two hours. Twenty two freaking hours — roughly the same length as the entire lifespan of a mayfly.
It wasn’t just that it was long, it was crazy, sleepless and almost dreamlike. As we climbed the final hours into La Paz across bumpy unpaved roads, my head throbbed from the thin air. La Paz sits 12,000 feet above sea level. It’s the home to the highest airport in the world as well as the highest bowling alley, laundromat, yogurt shop and Chinese restaurant. Every business claims “we’re the highest ______ in the world” in a way not dissimilar from the way restaurants in America always claim their dishes are “world famous”. I’m pretty sure the clam chowder at the Topper Grill in Dublin, Ohio is not known in the streets of Paris, let alone the mountains of Tibet.
But I digress. My head is pounding. The only thing I’ve really eaten in the last twenty-four hours is some peanut butter toast, three pieces of far too garlicky, garlic bread and a 5 AM banana pancake in the freezing cold bus station of Puno, Peru.
“Are we on our third bus or our second?” I asked Brittany at one point. “It’s our third”
I take a deep breath in and release a deep sigh. This is a trip.
Oh, and getting back to that banana pancake. The banana pancake was — well, interesting.
We were sitting huddled next to a space heater in the restaurant having just slept about four and a half hours on our overnight bus. In addition to the banana topping the pancake comes out with weird drips of tube squeezed caramel that look likes hamster diarrhea. The caramel wasn’t on the menu description of “panquete banana” and I wasn’t particularly thrilled about my off the menu “bonus” additions. I look up suspiciously at the waiter as if he is some type of Peruvian witch doctor and the caramel squirts are gastrointestinal voodoo dolls ominously foreshadowing the next fifteen hours of our journey into Bolivia.
I don’t think so buddy. You gotta wake up earlier in the morning to catch El Guapo in your voodoo spell.
I wisely decide to take them off the pancake delicately lifting each one off. with a knife as Brittany assists with another knife on the opposite end of the caramel rope. It was kind of like the game of Operation. Operation Caramel Poops.
After successfully completing our mission, we had a perfectly clean pancake and I was quite proud of our handiwork. In any other situation I would have given Brittany a high five. But right now celebrating anything felt false.
I will say, the pancake itself was pretty good. We split it, and when we finished it I shot Brittany a look. It’s that look somewhere in between “ce le vie” and “where the fuck are we?” reserved for those special moments like when it’s 5 AM in a frigid Peruvian bus stop in Puno and you’ve just surgically extracted brown caramel worms from your banana panquete.
The journey would only get weirder. Later that day we would be herded like sheep across the Bolivian boarder and rushed with a sense of urgency by the bus director in and out of a crowded immigration office. Americans and a few other foreigners had to do extra paperwork and we were the last ones to get back on the bus. The guys directly behind us in line at the immigration office weren’t so lucky. Our bus driver had warned us that the bus would only wait for an hour. He wasn’t kidding. The bus left without them, with their backpacks and everything still on the bus.
They had been sitting in the seats in front of us on the bus. The seats were now empty except for a bottle of water and a pair of gloves. I couldn’t believe the bus was just going to leave. It seemed criminal to leave with all their stuff. I should have said something when we started driving off. But I didn’t. Even if I had, I don’t think it would have made a difference. But I still felt bad, like I had failed to stand up and do the right thing.
A few minutes later we pulled into the town of Copacabana on Lake Titicaca and everyone got off the bus. And then just few short minutes after that, the two dudeswho missed the bus pulled up in a taxi. Oh good! I breathed a sigh of relief as my feelings of guilt disappated.
An hour later we’d get on our last bus of the journey from Copacabana to La Paz. Coincidentally the dudes, whose names we’d find out later were Sean and Gerald sat down next to us in the only open seats left in the very last row of the bus.
The silver lining of this bus journey was that we would befriend Sean and Gerald. They were Singaporean college students doing a study abroad trip in Lima and they were really interesting.
Going into our conversation the only things I knew about Singapore was that it was a city state, that you couldn’t spit gum on the street lest you want a caning, that they were supposed to have a nice airline, and that if I remembered correctly from my international political economy class in college, it was one of the four “Asian Tigers.”. It’s weird how little we know about other countries. A whole nation of six million people reduced to four random factoids.
After what was maybe a two hour conversation I now know so much more about Singapore. For instance, it’s a single party democracy (autocracy?) where the country’s founder and ruling leader just passed away last year. The state owns the media and there is a decent level of sensorship. People have many democratic rights but not all. But people don’t seem to care too much because the economy is stable, there’s virtually no crime and most people are relatively comfortable.
What else did I learn? Oh yeah. The official language is English but many languages are spoken including Mandarin, Malay, and one called “Singlish” which is similar to our “Spanglish”.
The boys said that Singapore is known as a melting pot of ethnicities cultures and religions. It has a genie coefficient of .48 and a population that is about 75% ethnically Chinese with Malaysians and others mixed in. When I asked if they have any problems with racism or classism, they responded that they didn’t and. mentioned how they both grew up with friends from different cultures and that by law, the government forces people of different races, ethnicities, etc to live together. So for instance an apartment building might only be allowed to be 60% Chinese.The rest of the tenants have to be of different backgrounds. I found this Fascinating.
These two guys were great (and i’m not just saying that because we’re now friends on Facebook and there’s a small possibility they might be reading this). The last few hours was like human Wikipedia. I loved it. It’s one one of the things I love most about travel. It’s an opportunity to learn about people places and things that were never in your mind more than a couple of factoids.
After 22 hours we finally made it to La Paz. It took us three busses, two taxis, and a boat across Lake Titicaca. We said goodbye to Sean and Gerald and parted ways.
Now, I’m writing this post from a bus again. We’re heading back to Lake Titicaca. Its supposed to be about four hours. But we have a flat tire and it looks like it’s gonna be more like eight. We haven’t met a Sean or Gerald on this bus. Bummer. But silver lining this time is I discovered a new podcast called the Nerdist and it’s hilarious.
