It Wouldn't Be a Bolivian Experience Without a Blockade

I have finally come back in La Paz after traipsing around the country for more or less a week and half. It feels good to be back at home base, although I’m dead tired because I spent 24 hours trying to get from Sucre to La Paz due to the good old, classic Bolivian blockade.

I left Sucre at about 6:00pm last night on a 12 hour bus ride to La Paz. The ride in bus camas ( as they call the buses that recline to more or less a 45-degree angle and have more leg room) are generally pretty tranquil, but I find it a bit hard to sleep in the cramped quarters. I had a pleasant surprise when I awoke to something small hitting my chest with a thud, and realized that someone had vaulted a gum ball through the air and onto my chest. The gum ended up tangled in my headphones and also in the ends of my hair (I had to cut it out with a swiss army knife.) I wanted to yell out a serious of Spanish and American swears, but as it was about 12:30am and most of the bus was fast asleep, I decided to just let it go.

At about 2:00am we stopped at the side of the road, and at the time I though we were ahead of schedule or taking a break. At 6:30am, when the sun came up, the bus was still parked at the side of the road, and from what I could tell without my contacts in – we were in the middle of nowhere a good hour and half before we were schedule to arrive in La Paz. After the man in the seat in front of me stuck his head out the window, he announced to the bus that we were, in fact, stuck in a blockade, and that there were “hartas flotas” (a ton of buses) in a row. A few people decided to try their luck at walking, but my seat-mate (a nice Bolivian man studying tourism) and I decided to wait it out a little while to see what would happen. Our bus driver managed to drive down the wrong side of the road a good half a mile, but when we realized that we weren’t going anywhere further, we joined a group of quechua men and started trekking down the road.

At the head of the blockade, which I would guess was about a mile long, we could see a group of people parading across the road. To avoid confrontation we hiked over a small hill (I was carrying about 50 pounds worth of luggage and gifts) and then made our way back over to the road, only to see that there was a definite shortage of taxis or minibuses transporting people away from the blockade. After hiking down the road for about an hour (the view was gorgeous, the sun was just starting to come over the hills), we finally ran into a taxi driver who piled six very grateful people into his rather decrepit car and took us to the center of Challapata…only to find that there was another, larger blockade.

My amigo and I set off walking again for another half our or so, this time past an even longer line of flotas and transport trucks. We walked past the main protest area, filled with miners from the Oruro area, who gave me a lot of funny looks because I was not only the only gringa around, but I was also walking with a Bolivian man. (According to http://www.abi.bo/index.php?i=noticias_texto&j=20070822104411, the miners were protesting the suspension of mining due to the danger of water contamination.) Eventually we saw a flota that was turning itself around to go back to Oruro, and after it made its way across the dirt and salt ground (the town is close to some salt flats), we squeezed our way onto the bus (after literally fighting the crowd of 150 people). Luckily there were quite a few empty seats, and by the end even the aisles were crammed with people.

So from Challapata to Oruro (3 hours), and then Oruro to La Paz (3 more hours), my amigo and I managed to make it back to the city only about 8 hours after we had been scheduled to arrive. But like I said, my time in Bolivia wouldn’t have been complete without a blockade.