La Paz to Rurrenabaque: You Got to Get Out of Town and Get Filthy!

La Paz to Rurrenabaque: You Got to Get Out of Town and Get Filthy!
May 13 and 14.

The idea of moving out of my private room and into a dormitory in my hostel was so unappealing that I decided to just get out of town.  I need to get to the Amazon anyhow, so I weighed my options.  All the planes leaving from La Paz to Rurrenabaque were full today, tomorrow and there are only a few seats left the next day at 695 Bolivianos.  Alternatively, I could get on a bus from La Paz to Rurrenabaque at 12:30pm and ride that sucker for 18 hours for 80 Bolivianos. I chose door number two!  Door number two would turn out to be 18 hours to cover 300 kms of ground.  That is a bad road from La Paz to Rurrenabaque, but a gorgeous adventure.  I am desperate for heavy sea level air.  I am desperate to not feel like an 80 year old man with no wind in my lungs.  It was time to make a non-altituded move.  Plus, I still seem to have a small stomach ache from my misbehavings from hog wild night two nights ago.  Time to go…

The vessel to carry me was a super shitty old bus that we packed with people, and the back four seats were stacked to the roof with supplies to be sent to from La Paz to Rurrenabaque.  In my two seat row, one my my seats was blocked off by some huge rolled up thing in a canvas.  As we started to drive, water began to leak from the roof of the bus to the floor in the middle of the aisle.  Wow!  I have no idea how this would turn out.

There are pigs running wild everywhere in the suburbs of La Paz.  They look to be happy in the dirtiness of their filth.  The road out of town was more of a road than I expected, and it was a beautiful drive.  There are waterfalls coming down the mountains and the paved road just somehow clings to the mountainside as it weaves circles to get down and up mountains that we drove about 20 km/h down.  Sometimes the bus would drive as normal on the right-hand-side, and then for a while on the mountain curves the bus drove on the left-hand-side and we met cars as if we were in England, and no cars seemed to care about the change.  All I could think about was if I had driven a motorcycle I would have no idea what side of the road to drive on and would have been left as a grease-ball within an hour.

We then drove through little towns on dirt roads that were totally unfit for a bus and had straight edge cliffs on them that were as deep as 400 meters to the river below.  I was taking pictures of the bus wheels that were no more than 15 centimeters from the edge of those cliff edges as we rounded a corner.  We drove through little towns rattled our way through on the bus until some kind of traffic jam held us up on a beautiful muddy curve on the path/road for two hours. We were in the middle of nowhere and there were honking horns, heavy trucks, buses, and cars all hoping to get through.  None of us gringos had any idea what was going on, so we just sat there looking out our open windows at the muddy Bolivians trying to direct traffic to create order in the middle of no place in particular.  I fell asleep sometime shortly after we go moving again.  At one point I woke up when a guy in army camouflage came onto the bus to inspect the good we were transporting that were in the back of the bus where I was sitting.  That made me wonder what I was sharing my seat with…

I woke up when the sun was shining and we were in deep mud on the roads.  There were horses grazing on the sides in places and a lot of potholes that heavy trucks were busting though.  There was a minivan stuck in a pothole that had to be pulled out before we could pass and at one point, our bus also got stuck.  The mud-holes were so deep that even the Bolivians were taking pictures of them.  Sometimes the bus driver would get out to walk ahead of the bus to assess whether or not he was going to be able to navigate the bus through the ruts in the road.  There were times when our bus was spinning tires and sliding sideways on the road to get through a pothole.  Finally, we got hung up in a deep mucky pothole and the bus was on such an angle that I was concerned that we were going to tip over.  The bus driver was concerned enough too that he had all of us passengers move to one side of the bus so that our weight might help keep the vessel on its wheels.  Then the bus driver and his helper got out with an iron bar and a shovel.  They dug at the front of the pothole and shovelled its edges down.  They seemed happy in the situation as they were whistling and digging in the mud to free a stuck bus of locals and gringos.  After about 20 minutes the driver got in, we all leaned to the side in our seats, the bus got traction, and we were out.  It was about 20 hours of very crazy bus riding from La Paz to Rurrenabaque.