Even though we were disappointed about missing the Salt Flats, we had a really great few days in La Paz and had a chance to, em, let our hair down before boarding our flight to Tarija. We knew absolutely nothing about Tarija, it was simply recommended by the girl in the Amazonas Office as a good place to cross the border to Salta.
It turns out that Tarija a really pretty and scorching hot holiday spot for wealthy Bolivians and Argentinians - it kind of reminded me of The Hamptons. It's best known for its vineyards but we didn't opt to do a tour as we will be in Mendoza soon and will have plenty of time for wine tasting there. Instead, we ate ice creams in the sun, ran away from pigeons in the square and visited Casa Dorada, which is the building on the 20Boliviano bank note.
Tarija has lots of fancy hotels but we stayed in possibly the town's only hostel, called Casa Blanca. The guy at reception could not do enough to help us and the rooms were nice and cosy. It was a bit loud at night with the road just outside the window and people playing music, but it was definitely a good night's sleep compared to what was ahead of us the night after...
We had no idea how to go about getting across the border to Argentina and then on to Salta by ourselves, so we found a company online called Red Dragon who look after the whole trip for 250Bolivianos. After we found the office and booked our ticket, we read a few bad reviews about Red Dragon online and freaked out slightly. But we had been on 10 hour busses in Bolivia with no air con or toilets - how bad could it be?
We were pleasantly surprised when we were picked up by a really modern bus and a driver who asked us to put on our seatbelts (yes, it had seatbelts, imagine!). After about 4 hours we arrived to the Bolivian checkpoint and were stamped out of the country, got back on the bus and drove 1k down the road to the Argentinian checkpoint and got stamped into that country. But when we went to get back on our lovely bus the driver was taking all of our stuff off it and loading it into... a Renault Clio. Our new driver was the spitting-image of Hurley from Lost and had a mouthful of coca leaves in his mouth so large that we couldn't understand a word he said.
So now there was Hurley and an old Bolivian lady in the front, Karen, me and a woman with a baby in the back and all of our stuff somehow squashed in the the tiny boot. It was not comfortable.
Hurley drove for about 10 minutes before pulling over and making us all get out on the side of the road where 3 Argentinian guards were waiting. As we stood watching him pull everything out of the boot (even the baby looked at him like he was crazy), I gave myself an internal pep talk that went something like this:
"Right, this is it Emma. It was bound to happen at some stage, you're in South America. We have to bribe these guards or we'll never get our stuff back. Crap I can't speak Spanish. Ok ok I've got this"...
Turned out we had a flat tyre.
And the guards were really nice and gave us a jack and let us use their bathroom. Scarlet for me.
Throughout the rest of the night we would learn that Hurley has a penchant for power-ballads, we would be stopped by guards and asked to get out of the car and open our bags 2 times, stop for gas and have to get out of the car 3 times, and I would be head-butted by a Bolivian baby (but just the once).
We arrived in Salta at about 7am and I realised how much I have changed in just 7 weeks of travelling South America, because, all in all, I'd actually consider that journey quite the success!
I'd still recommend Red Dragon despite their bad reviews, they should just make it clearer that you will have to change cars because some people looked quite frightened and didn't know what was going on. The rest is beyond their control really.
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