Traveling to Tiahuanaco

Early in the morning, before the sun had risen, we awoke to find a light rain just beginning. We grabbed our bags and hit the streets to try to find a taxi that would take us across the mountains to Tiahuanaco, several hours away. The taxi drivers seemed to salivate at the prospect of foreign tourists, and tried to rip us off royally. Eventually, we settled on a bus destined for La Paz, where we could easily get a cheap taxi or a minivan to take us the rest of the way.

Unfortunately, bus service in Bolivia is notoriously bad, and after a while it became clear that our bus would not go much faster than 30kph (about 20mph) up and over the mountains. The rain poured down heavily, but for some reason the driver chose not to use his windshield wipers. All the windows of the bus fogged over as the temperature dropped, including the windshield. Every few minutes the driver's assistant would smear a dirty rag across the windows, creating a little patch of relative visibility on the opaque window. As we gained altitude, little flakes of snow mixed with the rain, as the bus wound its way over the winding road with hundreds of feet of canyon below.

At some point, we had to exit the bus and take a boat across a river. From the far bank, as we watched the boat slowly make its way across the river perched precariously on a barge, we decided that this bus was not going to get us there in a reasonable timeframe. We found a minivan who's driver was willing to take us the rest of the way to Tiahuanaco for around $15 each, which was acceptable for a 2 1/2 hour drive. The minivan belched thick black smoke as we left the bus and its passengers behind at the docks. These minivans, known as "combis", are common in Peru and Bolivia, and although they have 15 narrow seats stuffed inside, they will often carry over twenty passengers. Luggage is stacked on the roof sometimes 6 feet high. You can flag them down on the highway if they have room, and you pay based on how far you are going, often negotiating a price rather than paying a fixed tariff.

All along the road were apartment buildings, offices, garages, and gas stations. As many were abandoned as inhabited, and very few had ever been painted. Almost all of the buildings were made of cheap, brick-colored cinder blocks, held together with grey mortar. Fields that had once grown crops were overgrown with weeds, and everywhere there were walls that no longer served any purpose, whatever they once deliniated now long returned to the wild.

We came within site of La Paz, a bowl stretching as far as the eye can see, filled with trash, pollution, and many more abandoned buildings. Smoke rose from the low buildings and settled over the low city, with no fresh air currents to clear it out. A tiny adobe shack with a tin roof carried a sign: "Computers For Sale". A compound that looked like a small abandoned prison had a logo for a Bolivian pharmeceutical manufacturer, and a shifty-eyed guard with a rifle guarded the front gate. Desperately ill dogs stumbled into traffic, half-blind with food and water poisoning. Naked children ran after the dogs, laughing. Fortunately, our turn off soon led us perpendicular to the road into La Paz, and soon we were once again traveling through beautiful mountain fields, farms, and open highway.

We made it to Tiahuanaco right on schedule.