2.25.2007

i left jujuy at 5 am and promptly passed out, having not slept all night because i chose to just walk around and visit a bit.
i was awoken at 11am by the sound of a dozen screaming children and i was drenched from having fallen asleep with my sweater and my hamac/sheet.
the air conditioning basically didn´t work, and there were no windows that we could open, not even the emergency exit; we would have had to break the glass.
we stop the bus in the middle of la pampa for half an hour to try and fix it. doesn´t work. we´re already behind schedule, we´ll try at the next rest stop.
but a man passed out, and people started banging on the windows screaming parada, parada por favor. we the bus stopped again, and everyone got in a circle around him and started fanning him with what they could and throwing water on his face. that was another 30 minute stop.
i was the only person on the bus left with water so i passed it to the woman behind me who had 2 kids with her, who wouldn´t stop crying. the bottle never made it back to me, but that´s not a problem, i could deal with it.

we finally get to a gas station, where a couple of the passengers climbed onto the top of the bus to try and opppen the top windows. a really intricate system with wood and string and hooks, well it was functional anyway. there was also a bath thingy and a shop where we all filled up on water for the children and i bought some 4 bottles of water "just in case" which by the time we had to stop at another gas station because the motor was overheating were already long gone.

by that time it was already 19h and we were 3 hours late - the bus didn´t leave until 21h and instead of arriving in BsAs at 3am as planned, i got off the bus at quarter to eight.
you get what you pay for, i suppose. but because of the 45 degree heat inside the bus with children screaming and no air conditioning, water or on bus movie as promised, you can imagine the hell that it was. all 28 hours of it. people were very solidary - the first floor of the bus was more ventilated so everyone let the older women and young children sit down there and the rest of us kind of lived with the dripping swear and sticky seats.

i do however have a strange memory - i don´t know if it´s because of the mix of heat and altitude and diazempam to sleep it all off or if it actually happened -- of someone being on top of me, hands under my shirt and trying to do something to me obviously, and i had no force but managed to escape it unscathed.
i´m thinking it was probably a hallucination rather than reality. i´d rather think it anyway. especially if it concerned the ex convict covered in kinfe wounds sitting next to me, who told me he was going to bsas to find the woman who killed his child.

um.. help.


i was lucky enough to have met a twenty five year old argentinan who´d just been hitchhicking through bolivia and peru who was going to the same barrio as i was. we had chatted a bit about tattoos, okupas and the road, so when he offered to accompany me to aprille´s i accepted without hesitation - he lives about 3 blocks away further north so he took me all the way there. it´s nice cause had he not been there i would have been completely lost.

so after 42 hours in 3 buses since thursday night i´m now finally in bsas and it´s hot as hell, i mean arica and lima were hot but it was a dry heat - here it reminds me of those hot humid montreal nights, or toronto last august at petra ´s with the power outages heh.
i lent my patagonia handbook to an aussie on the busride and forgot to ask for it back when i got off in a hustle in jujuy instead of salta. oh well. i´ll find another one.

i figured out that for some reason commenting was set to members only which is stupid so now you can continue not commenting :)

3 commentaires:

Panda Pendu a dit…

ahh all of this sounds so exciting.. what i would give to be there right now. thank you thank you thank you for writing about it at least, i can litterally see every single thing you described, the andes, the children, i could feel the heat, the sand.. every minute detail and then some <3 ca m'inspire et ca me motive... it reminds me what i love about life, it reminds me what im craving for and yet i get tremendously ashamed at the thought of not being out there and living.. x_x take care of yourself <3 [[(!by the way, for the comments problem, you can go and set that all up in the 'customize' section.. !)]].. deeEe..

narfette a dit…

je sais la dee c pour ca que maintenant tout le monde peut dire prout

Anonyme a dit…

Hey Narfette,

Merci de partager cette fabuleuse aventure!!
Profite en bien surtout éhéh on se voit à ton retour :)

LynC (et le petit matis aux yeus kakis)