Leave midday the Sunday of Easter. The white in this photo isn’t some weird camera phenomenon; those are the clouds we are driving through because of La Paz’s high altitude!
Take Bolivia’s “Death Road”. Pray a lot. Put on my shoes and put my knife in my pocket, trying to make a mental game plan of what I’ll do if the bus flips. It doesn’t flip.
At some points, we have less than a foot between the tire of the bus and the drop-off of the ledge. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.
Arrive in San Borja (a midpoint of our journey) at 3am. Everybody leaves and we aren’t sure when the next bus will leave. So we feed snacks to scraggly dogs, sit on our packs, and take turns resting.
At 3:30am, this random car shows up and offers to take us to Trinidad. I talk to him and we try to decide if we’re being lied to that “there is no bus that goes to Trinidad because the road is so ugly”. I translate and haggle him down until we get to a price we agree to. We pile on our bags and head out before 4am.
The bags are slipping off the car at about 5:30 am, so we get off to tighten them. When we do, it looks like we only have 5 (not 6) bags. Our driver counts them at least ten times…incorrectly. We lost a bag.
He’s muttering quickly to himself before throwing the car and speeding around. We ask a man on a horse if he’s seen the bag. He hasn’t.
We keep going. We stop and see a car coming towards us. Our driver signals it to stop. It doesn’t. When it drives past, our driver gets back in our car and starts speed racing to catch the other car. We think he’s insane.
We catch up to the other car, and now he’s yelling. They’re yelling and we’re involved in a back-road drag race with this random car. Our driver throws our car in front of theirs, forcing them to a halt.
Josh gets out to see Erin’s bag in the front seat of the car. They demand payment. We pay the bag pirates and they drive off.
Our driver tells us, “I knew it was them when they didn’t stop. I was falling asleep driving but now I’m awake!”
We see lots of animals on the drive. We drive through puddles, mud, and caked dirt. Our driver gets out to pee at least 7 times, even though he’s not drinking any water. He has a mouth full of coca leaves giving him a steady stream of uppers.
It looks like we’re driving through a small lake because we’re driving through a small lake.
Take two janky-great ferries.
Arrive in Trinidad in the afternoon and hang out in the patio of a church. Rest, read, pray & tan. Prepare to leave early the next day to Camiaco.
This is the car that 8 of us will take to Camiaco. 3 on back, 3 inside the back cab, 1 chilean missionary + her daughter in the passenger’s seat, and the driver. They describe this truck as “having everything wrong with it”.
We take turns riding inside & outside. We break down about 5 times. The 2 hour drive takes us a little over 6 hours.
Welcome to Camiaco! Ministry starts at 6:15 tomorrow morning!
