Uyuni, BOLIVIA

I still can’t believe I made it here yesterday. The trip started out all right–although my bus from Humahuaca was an hour late in arriving at La Quiaca, on the Argentine-Bolivian border, I made it across without problems, mostly thanks to the huge number of children that seem to run wild in the border area and who somehow reappeared ahead of me at each checkpoint (no matter which side of the border I was on) to tell me where to go and what to do in the complete absence of any sort of signage. I got my passport stamped, filled out the immigration form (“Are you involved with any terrorist groups? Have you ever participated in a genocide? Are you coming to Bolivia to traffic drugs of any kind?”) which the Bolivian officials didn’t even glance at, and only had to ask directions 3 times to get to the train station, which I guess was right where it was supposed to be, just farther away than I’d thought.

And that was the end of the easy part. When I got to the station around 1pm, I discovered that the lone ticket agent had gone on his lunch break and wouldn’t be back for an hour. Not only that, there were only 18 unsold seats on the 3:30 train–and about 25 people already waiting, who glared at me as I took a seat. I later understood the glares–normally in a situation like that each person takes a number, so that everyone gets served in the order they arrived. Unfortunately, the numbers had run out after the 5th person, which meant that everyone else was preparing to fight tooth and nail to keep their place in “line”.

Actually, people were amazingly nice about it at first. When the ticket agent finally arrived, everyone shuffled over to stand in some sort of order, and everything was relatively tranquil until the guy announced that not only were there just 18 seats left for that day’s train, there were just 17 seats left for the next day’s train. I have to hand it to him–that’s not an announcement that I’d want to make to a roomful (by that time) almost 80 people who had already been waiting for over an hour. Someone tried to cut the line, and it started to get sort of ugly… and that was about when I realized that the office didn’t take credit cards, and I had forgotten to get Bolivianos on my way to the station, and I didn’t even have enough Argentine pesos to change to buy a ticket–so even though I was sort of close to the front of the line, I had absolutely no money.

So… I played my only two cards: the dumb tourist card, and the damsel in distress card. And amazingly, it worked–I still don’t know how. The seats for both that day and the next were already sold out, so I was getting ready to spend a couple of nights in Villazón… but just as I got to the front of the line, a little old man came in to return his ticket for that day. I pleaded with the ticket agent to let me buy it, and then to please please pleeeease (there’s no such thing as dignity in a situation like that) hold it for me for 10 minutes while I ran to get some cash. He took pity on the “bella señorita turista” and said I could. The train left at 3:30pm, and it was 3:05pm when I sprinted out to find a taxi and cash in one of my traveler’s cheques at a casa de cambio.

Or at least that’s what I thought. Silly me, but how was I to know that most of these money places had never even seen traveler’s cheques, let alone exchanged them? I went to one place, and they looked at me like I was crazy, then directed me to another one around the corner, where they directed me to a bank. Time: 3:12. The bank didn’t change those cheques either, but they said there was an ATM a few blocks away… which, when I got there, I found was only for deposits. The instant cash branch didn’t change the cheques either. Time: 3:18. All told, I must have tried every money-changer in town before I found a lady who took my cheque and calmly counted out 381 Bolivianos, ignoring my increasingly frantic fidgeting as I waited. Time: 3:27. The taxi driver floored it back to the station, where I sprinted inside, grabbed my backpack off the middle of the floor where I had left it, and ran to the front of the train. Time: 3:29. Whew. Only not quite… My backpack wouldn’t fit in the overhead, so I had to take it to the baggage car all the way in the back of the train. Then I ran back to the front, said goodbye to the ticket agent (who had mysteriously reappeared) and jumped on to the train as it was pulling away. Time: 3:31.

And that was the end of the drama, except for the hostel not being where it was supposed to be when I arrived in Uyuni last night around 1:30am. But luckily I found a place, and tomorrow I’m leaving on a tour of southwest Bolivia–three days, and ending up in Chile on the 3rd. I’m actually kind of bummed that I can’t stay longer in Bolivia… the little I saw from the train was gorgeous, and the culture is absolutely different from what I’m used to in Argentina. But I’m already feeling that a month is way too short for this kind of trip, and anyway, I’d never forgive myself if I ended up having to rush through my tour of the Patagonia. So Chile it is, and from there, I’m heading south again.