The Cursed Travel Day
La Paz, Bolivia - Day 8
I figure I'd start today's blog off with laying out today's travel agenda.
1:00 AM: Wake up and make sure everything is packed
1:30 AM: Find a taxi and get to the Airport
2:00 AM: Find GOL airlines check-in and get checked in for our flight
4:00 AM: Flight to São Paulo, Brazil scheduled to depart
9:30 AM: Land in São Paulo, Brazil
9:50 PM: Since this previous flight was not 'connected' to the next two flights, we had to pick up our bags
12:00 PM: BOA airline is a small Bolivian carrier and they only had one flight from São Paulo that day, so their check-in wasn't open until about noon. When it opened, we checked-in
1:30 PM: Flight to Cochabomba, Bolivia scheduled to depart
3:30 PM: Land in Cochabomba, Bolivia
3:40 PM: Go through Bolivian Immigration
4:30 PM: Flight to La Paz, Bolivia scheduled to depart
5:30 PM: Land in La Paz, Bolivia
5:40 PM: Pick up our bags
5:50 PM: Pick up our car rental
6:30 PM: Settled into our AirBnB for the night
Fun back story, Katie and I already had issues with this travel day once since GOL cancelled the original route we were planning on taking a couple weeks before the trip. This caused us to eat the cost of one of the flights (no reimbursements or changes on BOA) and eat the cost of one of our already schedule AirBnB nights in Copacabana. Anyways, we stuck to the above scheduled for the most part, but had a few issues on top. The first flight check-in at 2:00 AM took forever because a large group was hogging all the check-in stations and didn't seem to be able to figure it out. Eventually some GOL employees came over and helped get things on track, but it took them 30-45 minutes. Fortunately we got there early. The next issue we would have started at 3:30 PM, Bolivian Immigration. We knew immigration would eat up most if not all of our one hour layover. Deboarding a domestic plane in South America has always been...interesting. People don't seem to follow the normal process where the first rows all get off, then the second, and so on. Instead everyone rushes to get their bag and tries to rush to the front of the plane to get off. You have to be a little "aggressive" to get off the plane unless you want to just wait, which some people do. In this moment of trying to rush out of the row we were in, I bumped my knee that had the big mosquito bite on it (remember from yesterday???) and it definitely did not feel good. Immigration was time consuming, but relatively painless. We made it to our next flight, but had to run to the terminal, since at the time we made it through immigration, we were sometime like 10 minutes after boarding started and 10 minutes before departure.
And then we were in La Paz, Bolivia. Immediately we were struck with altitude sickness. Nausea, dizziness, headache, out of breath, the whole kitten caboodle (I looked it up and the actual phrase is "whole kit and kaboodle", but Oxford Dictionary can't tell me how to live my life). Struggling through, we found the Hertz office and....it was closed. There were a few 24 hour phone numbers so I picked one at random and called it. No English. I apologized and hung up, calling another number. He also spoke no English, but fortunately had a friend with him that spoke some. She told us 'a car will be there in 14 minutes". Sounding good, we ended the call and began to wait. An hour later (because I wasn't certain that she said 14...or 40...so we gave the benefit of the doubt), we called again "there in 15 minutes". 30 minutes later, "there in 5 minutes". I believe the fellow showed up at around 7:15 PM and we started the paperwork. There were several complications there, mostly because neither of us spoke each others language, but with the power of google translate we made it through. Finally at about 8:00 PM, we were in the car and on our way to our AirBnB.
The 3 mile drive was only supposed to take 15 minutes. But unfortunately for us...Katie and I were about to have the worst hour of any of our trips ever. The original plan was to get us to Copacabana (a small mountain/lake town) before sundown, but because of GOL cancelling that ticket and Hertz two and some hour delay, we found ourselves driving at night, in an unknown major city, having been traveling for 19 some hours on VERY little sleep, and fighting altitude sickness. On our way out of the airport, we had an incident with Bolivian police. I rolled up to the checkpoint and told him "Hello sir. Sorry I don't speak Spanish, do you speak English?" He did not. I assumed he was asking for ID so I gave him my drivers license. He initially was going to ask us to pull off, but after talking to another officer, he told us to quickly be on our way. Which we did, into the unorganized, lawless bowels of the outskirts of La Paz. In one of my most Michael Scott moments ever, I allowed the GPS to take me through a night market. Imagine driving through Art in the Park, with 100 times more people at night. That was basically what I did. We were almost through when we came to an area that I could absolutely NOT go through so I turned around. It was so tight...I hit a poor old ladies little stand that was in the road. If we weren't in the situation we were in, I would like to think I would have got out of the car to at least apologize...but I was in survival mode and high tailed it out of there. It was only afterwords that I realized I had my high beams on the whole time, icing on the cake! Trying to get out of this night market area, I found myself going down the wrong way of a one way street. Angering many drivers of course. By the skin of our teeth we made it out onto a larger road and circled the whole neighborhood and then arrived to the address the AirBnB guy had given us. The thing about Bolivia is, there are no exact addresses. On the same block, I saw a house numbered 125, 355, 1925...so the address given really just got us to the overall neighborhood. Our host sent us a small hand drawn map on how to find the place and of course it didn't include any street names that matched up with any street names on Google Maps...but it did say it was right next to a school that we could find on maps...so there we went. We circled the school until we found our host standing outside. He helped me get the car into his tiny garage and then helped us get settled.
