South American Bus Stories III

After two, for Bolivian standards, quite unspectacular bus rides, we were looking forward to our third one: An overnight ride from Uyuni to La Paz. The guidebooks recommend taking only buses during the day, but there was none to La Paz. To be on the safe side we took the company, which is recommended in the Lonely Planet. 

Tired from the Salar tour not even the heavy shaking could stop us from falling asleep soon after the departure.

“Open the door!”

Suddenly we woke up in the middle of the night hearing someone pounding on a wall and repeatedly yelling: “Open the door!!!” We looked around and noticed that the bus stood still and was half off the road; in fact it was quite inclined. A glance out the window showed that we were inclined, but standing on an open level field. Our race bus to Uyuni performed more extreme moves without flipping over; therefore we were not really concerned. We were a minority, the man continued yelling and pounding until the driver opened the door. As soon as the door was open the whole bus wanted to get out. This is quite difficult because normally the gangway is occupied with locals sitting on huge bags and carrying their kids, using the bus to hitchhike. The longer it took to get out, the more people started to panic and begged the ones in the front to hurry. At the same time as everybody stormed out the driver tried to bring the bus back to the road. It started to be more dangerous to jump out the driving bus than to stay inside. It was quite scary hearing people screaming, sitting in an inclined bus in the middle of nowhere and realizing that even if we wanted to, we could not get out. Eventually the bus got back on track but the passengers stayed outside. It turned out that both drivers were drunk (that is how we got off the road) and the people refused to go inside until we found another, sober driver. 

“Arrest the drivers”

After a while a passenger offered to drive the bus to the next village, where we would call the operator to send us a new drivers. Maybe it was a misunderstanding or the new driver was looking for a bigger village, but we kept driving for a while. Suddenly the bus stopped again in the middle of nowhere and people started to yell out of their windows. We found a police patrol and the passengers wanted the drunken drivers arrested. Despite all the excitement I fell asleep. Michi told me later that we drove to a police station and waited there quite a while. Either they found another driver or proved that ours were able to drive. In any case, our lessons learned:

• Try to sit in front
• If not, hope that you can open your window, in case you need to get out fast