During our travel between Bolivia and Peru, everything didn’t quite go as planned. First off, two girls in our squad were robbed a few days before our first travel day. One of the girls lost her passport and money and the other lost her entire backpack containing passport, money, ipad and other electronics. These girls were working with the American Embassy and were able to get their passports quickly, but were not able to get their Bolivian visas fast enough. Because of this, we had to leave the two girls and one of our leaders behind in La Paz, Bolivia.
We then began the first leg of our journey. We were going on a 28 hour bus ride from La Paz, Bolivia to Lima, Peru. The first half of the bus ride went smoothly, but around 11 at night we hit some switchback roads. On one of these switchbacks, one of the luggage doors opened up underneath the bus. One of the girls noticed that it was opened and we immediately stopped the bus. A guitar was hanging out and we were not sure if anything had actually fallen out or not. The bus driver was under a time crunch because it took longer to get through the border than we originally thought, so he didn’t want to stop and go through the luggage. Luckily, after around 10 minutes of arguing with him we were finally able to convince him to let us pull all of the baggage out of the bus to get a count on it. We pulled all of the guys off the bus and had them pull out all of the bags. It was the middle of the night so we all had to have our headlamps on to count the amount of bags we had. According to the tickets the bus company gave us, we were suppose to have 41 articles under the bus. We counted and recounted and kept getting 40, one short. After reloading the baggage and arguing with the bus driver for another 10 minutes he finally decided to turn the bus around when we informed him that each bag probably would cost 1500 USD to replace. We backtracked around 30 minutes with no luck. Eventually we came to the decision that it was a lost cause and we would just get to Lima and figure everything out. Once we arrived in Lima, we found out that nothing was actually missing. The ticket that the bus company gave us was wrong and we were only suppose to have 40 articles under the bus.
That night we stayed in a hostel in Lima, Peru and the following day the squad had a free day to go out and explore the city. During the day I stayed back and worked on coordinating transportation from the hostel to the next bus terminal. The cheapest way for us to get there, other than walking an hour down dangerous streets, was by flagging down 13 taxis. So, that is exactly what we did. That evening we flagged down 13 taxis. We had a translator telling each taxi where we needed to go and they also bartered a fair price for each one. Everything seemed to be going smoothly and people were all starting to arrive at the bus station. After around 30 minutes of waiting we were still missing one of the groups. This time we sent out a group of people to accomplish different tasks. I went out with one other person on foot to find the other nearby bus stations. Others went to find wifi in case the lost group tried to contact anyone with their location (we couldn’t use our phones because we hadn’t bought new Peruvian SIM cards yet). After around 15 minutes of walking we found the rest of our group in a different bus station. It ended up that the taxi driver didn’t actually know where he was going and just decided to drop them off at one of the bus stations. Luckily, the second leg of our journey went smoothly and we arrived safely in Trujillo, Peru after a quick 9 hour bus ride.
