Santa Cruz
BOLIVIA
Cruz'ing out of Bolivia
By LYNDI
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Normally we wouldn’t write a blog on a city we spent less than 24 hours in, but Santa Cruz earned its way into our blog by epitomizing the frustrations of traveling in Bolivia.
It all started with a simple 40 minute flight from Sucre to Santa Cruz – Bolivia’s biggest city. The city definitely relates to Brazil rather than Bolivia for several reasons. First of all, it’s a city of size – over a million people. Bolivia only has a handful of cities in the first place, and those they do have are lucky to hit 100,000 people. Secondly, it’s located down near the Amazon basin, so whereas we’d been traveling in the Andean highlands where people don’t blink at 4000m altitude, Santa Cruz lies at under 500m and has the tropical climate to prove it. And lastly, the people look completely different. Miss Bolivia always comes from Santa Cruz because their population looks European – no, better yet – they look Venezuelan. Gorgeous. Not that the little “Bolitos” as they’re affectionately known from the Bolivian highlands aren’t beautiful – because they certainly are – but I just don’t see a young farmer girl in traditional dress putting on a Miss Universe sash any time soon.
After a 50 boliviano taxi ride, we arrived at our Hotel Arenal – the first real hotel we’d stayed in on the tour. And by “real hotel” I mean they had such modern amenities as an elevator and air conditioning. Very exciting. We took a quick walk around the central Plaza 24 de Septiembre (they were celebrating their 200 year anniversary by the way, so lots of green and white from Santa Cruz’s flag flying around) and then high-tailed it to La Casa del Camba to get some nice steaks.
The next day, Monday morning, our flight to the Bolivia/Brazil border town of Puerto Suarez left at 3pm, so we took taxis at 1pm and waited patiently to be called to the gate. After going through security (where Aaron had his beloved corkscrew apprehended) we waited to board our flight. And waited. And waited.
The flight got pushed back several times before we heard the inevitable call “Vuelo 133 a Puerto Suarez ha estado cancelado”. You don’t need to know Spanish to know what that meant. So we went to talk to the AeroSur front desk agent who said it was cancelled due to bad weather in Puerto Suarez, which is fine, there’s nothing anyone can do about that. So Aaron and I asked when the flight would be rescheduled. Our answer? Friday. We were standing there talking to this lady about our cancelled flight on Monday to find out it’s been rescheduled for Friday. Only in Bolivia.
So I ran to a local telephone booth and informed my office in Cuzco what had happened. Normally if we were traveling on our own, we could just get a bus the next day or something, no big deal. But when you’re running a tour, if you arrive a day late anywhere your entire tour gets messed up from then on out, so I had to figure out how to get us to Puerto Suarez that night. Basically they said we would have to take a bus, but the last nightbuses left Santa Cruz at 6pm and it was already 4:45 and we were waaay across town, so we’d have to take a bus the next day and be a day behind and possibly miss out on something along the way. Not on my tour!
So I grabbed the group (thank goodness it’s only 5 people!) and told our cab drivers to put the pedal to the metal and get us to the bus station rapidamente! We got there at about 5:30pm, I left my bags with Kim and Stef and ran around like a madwoman trying to find an overnight bus to Puerto Suarez that hadn’t left yet. I finally found a piece of junk, I mean – bus, that left at 6, so I bought six seats. 3 other gringos that were supposed to be on our flight had followed us to the bus station and since they didn’t speak any Spanish just got tickets on our bus as well. When we were finally able to load our bus, I took one look around and told the passengers to make sure they weren’t using the overhead compartments on this bus. The seediness of the bus and the whole Santa Cruz bus station was probably an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10, so everyone put their carry-on bags down by their feet. And sure enough, about 5 minutes later once the 3 remaining gringos got on, one immediately freaked out when he found out someone had replaced his bag in the overhead compartment with a false, empty backpack. Then the other 2 found out about 30 seconds later that their entire wallet with passports, flight documents, etc. had been stolen out of their bag in the overhead compartment. Yikes. Thank the Good Lord all my passengers had their stuff down by their feet, cuz those Bolivian thieves worked fast!
I had heard horror stories about the road from Santa Cruz to Puerto Suarez, and I guess fate decided it was finally my turn to get to experience it. About an hour outside of Santa Cruz – Bolivia’s biggest city – the road just stopped. Disappeared. It turned into some sort of muddy, pot holed trail that no bus driver in his right mind would have tried to navigate. Luckily, our bus driver was a raging lunatic and took it at high speeds. Needless to say, sleep was futile. We hit some bumps so hard that you literally jumped out of your seat. Or on some other good ones your head would slam down onto your jaw so hard you probably lost some enamel.
Finally, the beginning of the paved highway started around 3am and I could get a little bit of shut eye. It didn’t help that the entire bus was filled with dust and about 40 degrees Celsius, but by that time we were exhausted enough that sleeping in filth didn’t bother me. And so we arrived in Puerto Suarez. AeroSur cancelling the flight appeared to have been a good idea. It looked like the Big Bad Wolf had blown all the little shacks and trees down, so probably flying a Bolivian aircraft in the night before would have been a bad call. I’m not sure that I’ve ever been so filthy in my life, but we made it to the border, crossed without any (further) problems, and the tour continued right on course.
