The Absolute Worst

Day: 401

At 11pm last night it started raining, and it wasn’t a little shower, we’re talking about a deluge and it didn’t let up even when we woke at 6pm to go check on our plane which was supposed to leave in an hour and a half back to La Paz. The unfortunate part of having a grass runway (as Rurre does) is that when it rains flights get cancelled, namely our flight (and 3 from yesterday).

We were informed that we would be lucky to be on a plane in 3 days but it could take as long as a week until we would be able to fly.  This caused us two major problems, one: Rurre doesn’t have an ATM and we are just about out of cash, two: We really weren’t interested in spending another week here.

We found two other couples in the same position and we tried to get a private 4WD to drive us back to La Paz for the obscene amount (in Bolivia) of $400US for a 12 hour drive.  We found someone willing to drive, but the Slovenian couple backed out at the last second which left it quite out of our price range.  (FYI: the plane tickets were only $75US each). We found our way to a travel agent who booked us two tickets for $11 each on what we have constantly heard is one of the worst bus rides in the world.  16 Hours of bumpy, muddy dirt roads with shear cliffs on one side, and the highest (per kilometer) death rate out of any strech of road in the world.

We showed up at the bus station a little before the 11:30am departure, when we found it would be postponed an hour because one of the drivers lost the key.  12:30, there was still no sign of us leaving, but I started to feel a little… shall we say icky. Finally at 1:45 we all piled in, Felicia and I in the second to last row, and as soon as the bus started moving stale water from the last days rain came through every crack and soaked many passengers with black sludge, thankfully not us, but it did leave the buses floors soaking wet and I had to keep my daypack in a trashbag to keep my camera from getting soaked.  Within minutes we realized why people hated this bus ride so.  We were being thrown around like a hacky sack of some young hippy kids feet.

It took about 30 minutes before I realized something wasn’t right in the land of Rob.

“Um… Felicia, you mind if we switch seats so I can be by the window?”

Then it was on, vomit spilled from my mouth and three hour old empanadas covered the side of the big blue bus.  I proceeded to vomit for the next few hours until there was nothing left, after which, I still vomited more, just in the form of dry heaves into the jungle night.  I rode through the horrible Bolivian rainforest roads with my upper body heaving sprite and assorted day old foods out the window into thousand foot chasms.