Up until now, due mostly to the various vacationers I've been traveling with, I've been taking a combination of airplanes, cars, and long-distance buses to get from place to place. From here on in, though, it's all bus, all the time. Bolivia, notorious for terrible roads and deadly public-transporation wrecks, is probably a weird place to switch from an airplane-bus-car patchwork to a bus-only transportation regime. But at this point I have much more time than I do cash, so buses it is.
I took my first solo long-distance Bolivian bus on Saturday night. I had done a lot of research online before booking, and found that there were two top-class bus companies that go overnight from La Paz to Sucre. (Top-class = $19 USD for a ticket, which is a small fortune in bolivianos.) One of them, El Dorado, is notorious for a particularly gnarly series of fatal crashes, and was shut down for a month last year while the government investigated its safety record. The other, TransCopacabana MEM, almost shares its name with two other, less-reliable bus companies, Flota Copacabana and TransCopacabana. Completely unable to tell the difference between the three Copacabana-themed companies and worried about ending up on a pile of sticks on wheels, I bought a ticket on El Dorado. I figured, a little glibly, that post-El Dorado's brush with the authorities it was probably the safest choice anyway.
The other thing that my research told me was to be careful with my luggage. All buses into and out of La Paz, the internet said, stop in the suburb of El Alto to pick up additional passengers and supplies, at which point a small army of beggars and hawkers also boards, trying to get money out of the bus´s passengers however possible - including stealing any unattended or poorly attended bags. (Note that El Alto is a suburb in Latin American-style, meaning that it's home to people too poor to live in the city center, a strange inverse of the United States urban model). Sure enough, the bus had barely left the La Paz station before a teenage boy began striding up and down the aisle, telling anyone who would listen about a medical condition that left him prone to unpredictable fainting fits, and asking us for money so he could get his medication before the pharmacies closed. He left and was replaced by a man hawking necklaces of what he called "alpaca silver." For fifteen bolivianos apiece, we could be the proud owners of a piece of jewelry that would never rust, never stain and never tarnish! He finished with a mysterious demonstration that involved rubbing one of the chains repeatedly with a metal spoon.
All that was before we even got to El Alto. In El Alto, another wave of people boarded, selling mates and flashlights, begging money for their gout or blindness or bad leg. I refused all offers and kept my purse held tightly in my lap. About fifteen minutes later, the bus started again.
And went about a block. Ten more minutes of waiting, and a half-block more. The other passengers started getting impatient, leaning out the windows to yell, "Let's GO!" or going downstairs (it was a two-story bus) to harangue the bus driver. It took a while for the rumors regarding the delay to float back to me. There was an extranjero who had gotten all of his stuff stolen. He had gotten off the bus and was refusing to get back on. As the story spread through the top floor of the bus, someone turned to me.
"¿Hablas inglés?" she asked. I hadn't spoken anything but some basic Spanish since boarding the bus, but there's really no way to hide my tall pale foreignness in Bolivia. "El chico necessita un traductor."
I ran downstairs, holding my purse in one hand and my backpack in the other (I wasn't taking any chances). A blond kid in a t-shirt advertising La Paz's big party hostel was standing on the curb, alternately gesticulating wildly and leaning down with his head in his hands. The bus's drivers and the few passengers who had gotten off to try to talk to him were utterly stymied by the force of his panic and the language barrier - he spoke no Spanish, and no one, it seemed, spoke English.
"Where are you from?" I said, adding unnecessarily, "I speak English."
"England," he said, and then with more urgency: "They stole my backpack! It was right under my feet. I was touching it! Someone leaned over me and asked me to open the window so he could speak with someone outside, and then it was gone. Everything was in there. My money, my computer, my passport. I just bought a new camera. It's all gone."
"I'm so, so sorry." Unsure of what else to say, I slipped into emergency mode. "You need to find a place to stay tonight and then tomorrow morning, you need to get to your embassy. They should be able to help you there, I think." I consulted with someone behind me. "There's no embassy in Sucre. You'll need to stay in La Paz."
"I don't even have enough money to get a back to the city," he said. "I don't have anything."
"That's one thing you don't have to worry about," I said. "I'll give you some. How much do you think you'll need?"
That point, however, turned out to be moot. With me as an interpreter, the news of the Brit's dire situation spread fast. Within minutes, most of the bus was out on the sidewalk, everyone simultaneously sympathetic, embarrassed, and eager to hurry on to their destination. They were all yelling advice at me, which I filtered and then passed on to the Brit, who was barely listening - "Go to the police! Go to the embassy! You're never going to find your bag now, it's gone, let's get going!" Someone pushed their way through the crowd and handed me a wad of bills - a hundred boliviano note, a handful of twenties, a fifty. I don't know why they didn't give it directly to him, except that as the interpreter I had someone become the go-between connecting this lone lost foreigner and an entire busload of anxious Bolivians.
Eventually, the chaos subsided. The Brit, with two hundred-something bolivianos from the impromptu collection, retrieved his clothes from under the bus and prepared to head back to La Paz with a man who had left his wife and children on the bus to help get him safely into the city. As the passengers were re-boarding, an old man came up to the Brit, who was still crying a little, and with the utmost sincerity said, "Dear boy, you're alive. You're still alive. God bless you. Now get out of this godforsaken country." I translated, and the Brit almost cracked a smile. I very much hope he's on his way home now. I never even got his name.
The rest of the bus ride, needless to say, was relatively uneventful. I watched enough of R.E.D. to decide it wasn't worth trying to hear the Spanish above the rumble of the bus, and listened to my iPod, occasionally sleeping the kind of sleep that you think is wakefulness until you look back and realize you remember having dreams. Sucre is beautiful and peaceful and I somehow stumbled into renting a fully-furnished apartment, complete with living room and kitchen, for the equivalent of $9 USD per night. I take my next bus tomorrow. I will be holding tightly to my luggage the whole way.
No comments:
Post a Comment