Santa Cruz

In this miniseries of blog posts about my trip, this one will be the most boring. Sorry to disappoint, but at least it can only get better after this one.

So I´m on the plane to Santa Cruz...

I pass out for the first hour because I´m so exhausted from the past couple hours of running around. When I wake up, we´re receiving our meals and a drink. For the rest of the flight, I don´t really do much besides go over in my head how I´m going to contact my friends once I arrive in Santa Cruz. I check to make sure that I brought my little book that has their home phone number in it. Don´t have it. Must have left it in the hostel. Great. Luckily, I remember that I have their number in an email, so now I have to find an internet cafe (which I correctly figure will not be tough to do in the Santa Cruz airport).

Interesting sidenote, elections were held in Bolivia last week in which the people voted to give greater autonomy to various parts of Bolivia. They also voted that the government draft a new constitution. Well, on the plane ride there, I was sitting next to two Bolivianos, both of whom were connecting in Santa Cruz to continue on to La Paz, the capital. Well, the man sitting to one side of me was reading a book in Spanish. The title of this book, and this is a semi-rough translation, was ¨How to Write a Constitution¨.

So we land in Santa Cruz, and I´m through immigration in ten minutes. I change some money into Bolivianos (the name of the citizens and the currency of Bolivia), find an internet cafe and my friends´ number, and call them. When I shout surprise in Spanish to my friend Melissa on the phone, I can tell that she is less than thrilled to hear that I´ve arrived. But she´s nice and doesn´t want to make me fend for myself in Santa Cruz and gives me directions to their place.

Before I get into a cab, I realize that I don´t have a return flight back to BsAs as of yet. I look at the receipt to my ticket and figure out that I have an open return. So I decide it would be smart to book this return trip now and walk over to the AeroSur window. I talk with the woman and ask for a flight back in the beginning of the week. She informs me that there is nothing available. Shit. She puts me on waiting lists for Sunday through Wednesday. My best chance of making a flight is on Tuesday, where I am 4th on the waiting list. The other days, I am no higher than 20th.

So I get in a cab and arrive to my friends house. It is completely understandable that Melissa is pissed. Melissa and Ben live in someone else´s house. They are guests. So it´s weird for them, as guests, to have guests. I arrive to find that Ben is pretty sick with a sore throat. Damn. I can tell he´s a little upset that I just popped in, but also that he´s happy to see me (so is Melissa). So we have dinner, which Niko, the woman who lives in the house with her daughter and also cleans the house for the owner, makes for all of us. Over the course of the next few days, I was very grateful to share meals with Melissa and Ben(when he was up to it) and the rest of the Americans staying there, which were cooked either by Niko or Flores, the cook in the other house.

I´ll be honest, the next few days were pretty uneventful. Melissa and Ben will tell you that there´s not a whole bunch to do. I think at one point, Melissa said that she was making tasks for herself to do so that she wouldn´t be bored. But she was also going to classes about diabetes (which is a huge problem in Santa Cruz) in the morning, so I thought she was being pretty productive.

We watched the world cup final which was pretty fun. We went out to the main Plaza in Santa Cruz, which was pretty. Santa Cruz is a strange city. Like Buenos Aires, it´s a mix of the first and third worlds, expect there´s a shit-ton more third world and a hell of a lot less first-world in Santa Cruz in relation to Buenos Aires. The cab drivers are more insane in Santa Cruz. The majority of intersections don´t have stop signs or stoplights and so they´re pretty much a free for all and are very scary to pass through.

When I think about Santa Cruz, the one thing I can´t get out of my head is the odor that permeates the entire city. Burning trash. Why does it smell like this? Because people burn their trash. It´s an awful odor.

We also went out dancing a couple nights. I drank a decent amount of Pacena, the number one beer in Bolivia. Dancing in Bolivia is weird. There´s mostly Latin music at the clubs and bars, in contrast to Buenos Aires, where you will find mostly American music. And there´s pretty much no freak-dancing. People dance in lines across from one another hear. Strange.

So during my stay in Santa Cruz, I kept calling the airline Aerosur to see if I had moved up in any of the waiting lists. Turns out that I had somehow moved down all of them. Not really sure how that´s possible. Oh wait, corruption mixed with poor organization. Okay, now that makes more sense. On Sunday night, I was no higher than 30th on any of the waiting lists. Seems like if I want to get back to BsAs reasonably soon, I´m going to have to buy another ticket from another company. If Santa Cruz was more exciting and if I didn´t feel bad intruding in someone else´s house for longer, I might have wanted to stay in Santa Cruz. But that was not the case.

So when one of the other Americans was heading over to the bus terminal, I decided to join her to see if I could find a ticket to Puerto Iguazu, a city in Argentina which apparently has incredible cataratas (waterfalls) which I had wanted to visit.

So we go to the bus terminal, which is fucking loco. So many people running around, so many people selling things, so many bus companies trying to get your business. After taking care of my friends ticket, we head over to the international section of the bus companies. A woman directs me to a company which sells tickets to Puerto Iguazu. At the window of the Yacyreta bus company, I am greeted by Javier Fernandez, and plump, energetic Bolivian man who is wearing a red button-down shirt. Upon first glance at Javier, I realize that this is a man who will say anything to get me to hand over some money. So I listen.

Javier informs me that their company can take me as far as ciudad del este, a city which is in paraguay, but is right next to puerto iguazu in argentina. He informs me that puerto iguazu is located at the tres fronteras (three borders) of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. There are cities in each of these countries right at where these three borders meet. He tells me that the trip in 24 hours, and will cost me 480 Bolivianos (60 bucks) and includes two dinners, breakfast, and lunch. The bus leaves on Monday, the next day, at 8 in the evening. He describes the bus to me as very comfortable and tells me that the seats are semi-cama (translated as semi bed). Sounds pretty sweet to me. He also tells me that the driver is a muy bueno chofer, which for some reason I find reassuring at the time, and for some reason I would continue to find reassuring during the actual trip.

I don´t have 480 Bolivianos on me now, and I´m not yet sure if I want to sit on a bus for a day, so I agree to put down a little deposit of 100 Bolivianos (12 bucks) to reserve my seat.

On the taxi ride home, I decide that I don´t really want to stick around Santa Cruz for much longer. And I feel as though even though the bus ride is so long, it will be an adventure. So I decide I will return tomorrow night and make my way toward the tres fronteras.

Sorry this post sucked so much. I promise things get more exciting from here on in.