Cochabamba: Part II

Cochabamba: Part II                                                May 19th

You know how I said, “get out a sleeping bag and a pill and enjoy the 8 hours home”? Well, we did just that. Except 8 hours went by, my pill wore off and I woke up in my sleeping bag to Camilla excitedly saying something about a protest. This was about 8am, and we had already been stopped for three hours. I got up and off the bus to find that our bus was 12^th in a line of possibly 80 stopped busses all in a row down the dirt highway.

 I walked up to the front of the line to see what was causing the hold up. There it was. A maybe, two-to-three foot tall pile of rocks covered the width of the road. A burning truck tire, one of those big, thick, ridged ones, sat in the middle of the blockade along with a flag perched in the smoke of toxic burning rubber.

The Blockade

The girls and I watched as the police walked towards the front and, on their way to approach the protesters, they stopped to ask us where we were from and recommended a church up the hill with nice paintings in case we got bored. They told us it would be about an hour until the clearing of the rocks commenced. As we waited, two cholitas came up to shake our hands and see how we were doing. Some of the protesters also came to tell us there was another highway unblocked (not like our bus could magically hop out of line and on to another highway) and one of them even wanted a little dance with Camilla and Georgia.

The girls with one of the surprisingly lovely protestors.

Over all, I was just so impressed with how friendly and approachable everyone was out in the countryside. We were in a village called Calamarka about 50km outside of La Paz. Two women came out to sell quinoa topped with salsa and grated goat cheese – really good actually. This was around 9:30 and this was also around the time that Maryam and I realized how bad we needed to pee. The bus bathrooms were unavailable for use because the buses were all turned off. People were just wondering around everywhere… but it was an emergency. Thank God Maryam found some wet wipes in her bag. We walked about 10 meters off to the side of the road and ducked behind a crumbling mud wall. It was “epic”, as they say.

When we got back to the buses, gringos and Bolivians alike were migrating across the blockade on foot. One guy stopped to tell us that there were taxis on the other side of the wall that were shuttling people to El Alto (about 20 minutes outside of La Paz) for 15bs a person. We decided to wait it out a little bit longer. But around 11am it was clear that the rock blockade would probably stay up all day. A really nice Bolivian guy with a guitar case on his back waited for all of us girls and crossed the wall with us. He even got us a taxi to share with him, his girlfriend and her sister. So the eight of us pushed our backpacks and sleeping bags in the back of the taxi and sped off leaving the protesters to their bottle rockets and activism. Our driver was absolutely mental. I’m from India and even I was a bit unnerved by him. He would swerve to pass by trucks but when he started overtaking them, he’d slow down. So we’re watching cars come come closer and closer to hitting us head on, and just when it looks like a collision was inevitable – he’d make it past the trucks and swerve back onto our side of traffic. This guy who got us our taxi was so great – he got the driver to take us all the way to the La Paz bus station, still at 15bs a pop. He was so nice and helpful and I don’t even think I caught his name.

At noon, we made it back to the seventeenth floor of our Edificio 20 de Octubre. The bus was meant to get in at 6am. I took the best shower of my life and washed 36 exciting hours of Cochabamba out of my hair.