Travelling around in Bolivia can often be a bizarre and confusing experience. There are few working train lines in Bolivia (the only ones currently running link Bolivia with Brazil and Argentina, rather than connecting Bolivian cities internally), because during the neoliberal period the government sold off the railways to a Chilean company, who promptly decided that none of the train lines linking the Bolivian cities with one another were viable, and closed them down. For that reason, travel between one city and another in Bolivia is undertaken exclusively by coach. This is a much more pleasant experience than travelling by the same method in the UK, where extreme discomfort and often inflated prices (if paying on the day anyway) are the norm; in Bolivia there are three types of coach: normal, semi-bed and bed, with the price depending on the level of comfort you pay for. Before your trip starts (and often during it) you will often be offered a range of wares to purchase from men and women boarding the coach. Apart from drinks and snacks, over the years I have got used to the same man getting on the bus before I depart Cochabamba on the coach to offer travel pillows (he's been doing this for possibly ten year now!), students getting on to the bus to sell the products of their health-food related studies, and people selling books. Leaving La Paz for Charazani, I got used to the same two men getting on, one to sell books, and the other to sell medical pamphlets and medicine. It occurred to me that selling medicine to Kallawayas was like trying to sell freezers to eskimos, but he did seem to get some takers nonetheless. On certain bus routes the journey is livened up even more by small children getting on with musical instruments and unmusical voices. They sing at you and then ask you for money.
In the cities there is a bewildering range of buses on offer: Micros, in which you have to pay the driver when you get on, minibuses and trufis, in which you have to pay the driver when you get off, and something called a coaster in which the rules seem to vary. Oddly, given the name, the micro is the biggest bus cruising the streets. The mayor's office in La Paz has come up with a plan to bring in London-style bendy-buses, which would be able to fit in more people than any of the options currently available to bus-users. The bus-drivers have been up in arms at this proposal, carrying out strikes and marches on the streets of La Paz, because the implementation of this plan, as they see it, would lead to a loss of their jobs, as there wouldn't be a need for so many bus-drivers, and even those that continued to drive their current vehicle fear that passengers would prefer to board the new buses, and therefore they would get squeezed out.
My most memorable journey in Bolivia is probably the trip I once took from Charazani to down Apolo. The bus starts in La Paz and I got on mid-way between there and Apolo. There was only one seat left, next to the driver's assistant. The journey was supposed to take around 8 hours, but must have taken closer to fourteen, because the condition of road meant that all of the passengers had to get out to pull the bus with a rope around five or six times. The problem was that the bus kept getting stuck. Every time we got out to pull, my feet would sink into the gloriously wet mud, my sandals becoming caked in the stuff. At times the mud would become noticeably damper as rain poured down on us. Luckily, at least, it was warm mud.
