Che Guevara and the Chaco Crossing

We last posted while waiting in the bus station in Potosi. Stew had a fever and we were feeling short on time, so we decided to skip our planned activities and went directly to the bus terminal. We waited seven hours for our 20 ish hour ride to begin, which was probably the worst of the trip. Thankfully two weeks has lessened the memory of that awful ride (which highlighted in being dumped at a bus terminal at 5 in the morning in our shorts and informed that the word ¨direct¨meant ¨not in any way direct and you´re all screwed til another bus shows up in a few hours when we open.¨

Eventually, we got to Santa Cruz, the largest city in Bolivia. The climate is much more like Central America: hot, muggy, and beautiful skies. It was nice to be in a place with palm trees and fruit trees everywhere, but the town is basically boring. We did manage to get our Paraguayan visas with complete ease: we showed up, filled an application, deposited money in their account, and returned in three hours for the visas. After a quite mediocre art museum, there was nothing else to do in the town, so Tori was forced to go clothes shopping.

The next morning, we hopped on a local bus to Valle Grande. It is a town of about 6,000 people in an incredibly remote part of Bolivia. It is only 200 kilometers from Santa Cruz but takes between 6-8 hours in bus. There is even less to do here than in Santa Cruz, but it is an important historical site. Che´s body was brought here after he was executed in a small schoolhouse in La Higuera. The photos that went out to newspapers confirming his death were taken in the laundry room of the hospital before they took his body (and those of his comrades) and buried in them in unmarked mass graves. These were later found underneath the runway of the local ¨airport,¨ which is still unpaved. There is also a monument to Che which is somewhat ironically closed to the public and you have to pay $50 for a tour. Alternatively, you can pull up the chain link fence and sneak in...

Pretty much everyone in Valle Grande wants to sell a tour to La Higuera because there is no public transport there. After being disgusted with the prices people were trying to extract for the 35 kilometer journey, we split a taxi with two indigenous ladies for about 1/10 of the price. We assumed people were lying when they said the trip lasts 3 hours and that they were just trying to justify their prices. It actually takes 3 hours because the roads are so bad. Actually, we had to get out and walk along side our cab for a while because the road was impassable with our weight.

La Higuera is a tiny tiny village of about 5-10 families. There is a hotel, but the person who runs it was gone. Lodging and food were provided by the wives of the farmers. They all came up to us and tried to convince us to stay or eat with them because we were the only visitors. We ended up lodging in the school house along with the visiting Cuban doctor (part of the MercoSur alliances ´ ¨oil for doctors¨ program with Cuba). This got weird in the morning when there were children playing soccer while we were brushing our teeth. The main activities in La Higuera (possibly the only activities) are hiking to La Quebrada del Churo or Churo´s Ravine and visiting the old schoolhouse. The schoolhouse is just a plain concrete room about the size of a college dorm room but completely decorated with relics from Che´s life and various homages to the revolutionary. The ravine where Che was captured is a beautiful hike through pastures, rivers, and forests. We visitied the house of the old lady who fed the band and put them up for their last night. It would have been too small for even Tori to stand up in.

It took a full day of travel to get back to Santa Cruz: 3 hour taxi, 1 hour wait for the bus, 8 hours in the bus. We were too exhausted to get on the bus to Asuncion, so we had to spent all of the next day waiting. There really is nothing to do in Santa Cruz, so we stocked up on groceries and read in the park. Not really a bad way to spend a day. We were really glad we had bought so many snacks when we got to Paraguay, too.

Leaving Bolivia was more difficult than we expected. At 4 in the morning, we get kicked off the bus to go through immigration. We had left in 90 degree weather and it was now about 40, so our clothing was a little inappropriate. The guard starts calling out nationalities and telling them to get back on the bus. Ours is not one of them, but fortunately we´re at the front of the line. Stew gives him the passport and starts screaming ¨Are you from the American government?¨Stew was a little confused and thought ¨yes, we are associated with the U.S. Government....we´re citizens.¨ This was wrong and the guy started screaming ¨CIA! SPIES!¨ This is not a good way to wake up. He demanded all of the receipts and proof of our actions while in Bolivia. No one had told us this would be necessary, so we were a little confused. We didn´t have any receipts and couldn´t think of any way to get them either. Fortunately, Tori had the WIFI password written on the back of a piece of scrap paper that happened to have the name of a hotel. This, ridiculously, convinced the roided bureaucrat that he had done his job and he let us pass.

5 hours later we get to the Paraguayan side of the border. Does that confuse anyone else? I lost lines had no width. We unloaded again and put all our luggage in a line for the dogs to sniff. They were not interested in our bags at all, which we´re sure contain interesting smells. Everyone´s bags were fine and we all got back on our bus. And then we waited. And waited. And ate lunch...and waited. Eventually, someone told us that there were people on our bus with drugs and we had to wait for them. They had swallowed cocaine and the cops had to get it out of them. Finally, we go again, but stop five minutes later outside of the main immigration office where soldiers come and take all of the Bolivians off the bus and check everyone´s passports again. Hours pass and people start coming out and getting hand cuffed to the police trucks. 12 people have been taken from our bus and seven from the bus next to us. A woman that works at the Bolivian consulate in Paraguay is on the bus and starts taking the information for the prisoners to send to their families. Apparently they had each swallowed 300 grams of cocaine and were ratting each other out. One guy had looked nervous and his eyes were really red so that tipped off the authorities and they had x-rayed all of the Bolivians. One rich Bolivian got interrogated much more harshly because he didn´t have any coke and they thought he was the ringleader. He came back looking horribly shaken with two black eyes and a fierce temper. The Brazilian transvestite never came back. Finally, after 12 hours, they put all of the prisoners back on the bus and we all drove together to the jail with soldiers pointing their machine guns at the handcuffed people. We didn´t get dinner or breakfast, and our trip went from an estimated 18-20 hours to an actual 36 hours. Fortunately, we made friends with Alan from Ireland and Viktor from Sweden who entertained us.