On our expensive bus ride to La Paz, we were rudely awakened at 2am and told we’d have to change buses because our bus had to go back to Uyuni.  We swapped our luggage and seats with a busload of people who were heading the opposite way.  We tried unsuccessfully to get back to sleep.  We were annoyed, but what we didn’t know is that the next two bus rides would be even worse.

We had bought our bus tickets to Cusco from a travel agent in Copacabana.  Semi-cama, she had promised.  Tourist bus, she offered.  It was $10, I said to Lauren, “how could we go wrong?”

We should have just refused to get on when the bus showed up.  It wasn’t semi-cama.  It was a beaten up, old step-below-a-Greyhound bus.  And there were only 4 other tourists getting on the bus with us. Ever the optimist (ha!), I told Lauren that maybe this was the bus to Puno, a three-hour trip, and that when we got there, we’d get the better semi-cama bus.

We got to Puno without any serious complications.  Since we had a four-hour layover, we headed off into the city to eat and get in some internet time.  When we came back, we went to board our bus. 

At first, I thought we were lucky that our bus wasn’t the bus next to ours.  The locals had stuffed the cargo hold with all sorts of goods — ironing boards, bags of vegetables — and on top they were loading more stuff — including a bag of chickens.

Yes, a bag of chickens.  Live chickens.  Clucking, squawking chickens. (Lauren: And just to reiterate, this was a bag. Not a box, where the chickens are smashed in, but at least in an established space. This was a big Santa bag full of unhappy chickens that would cry out every time someone picked up the bag and smashed them all together with the force of the sides being pulled up in the middle.)

To get the bag of chickens onto the top of the bus, they tied a rope around the bag and a guy on the roof started hauling it up.  But the bag got stuck.  Frustrated, the man started jerking the rope harshly.  The chickens squawked loudly in protest.  After a few harsh tugs, the rope slipped and the bag of chickens went tumbling down with one final, loud SQUAWK!  It landed about four feet from me.

The owner of the chickens protested and this time they were more careful hauling the bag of chickens up, who were noticeably quieter this time.  (Eesh.)

We got on our bus and realized two things very quickly: our back seats were not semi-cama, and this was definitely not a tourist bus.  Lauren went back inside to protest, but the woman told Lauren to take it up with the person we bought the tickets from (who was back in Bolivia) and stopped listening. (Lauren: I almost had an ugly American moment when this woman refused to talk to me anymore, but I managed to maintain some semblance of calm… meaning I walked away muttering obscenities under my breath instead of into her face.)

Our bus ended up being not that much different from the bus next to us, minus the chickens.  Peruvian women dressed in traditional garb stuffed massive amounts baggage – often clothes and other items wrapped in a blanket – into every possible crevice available. Trying to make the best of it, we settled in, making sure our bags were locked to each other, locked closed, and in our laps (not on the floor or overhead). 

The bus left and I tried to doze for a few hours. Lauren vigilantly stayed awake, peaking out the window every time we stopped to make sure no one was snooping around in the cargo hold.  (Lauren: At one point, we stopped for over an hour, and I stood up in the aisle so I could see passers by on both sides of the bus. One might say that this is overly paranoid, and maybe rightly so. But everyone up until this point had told us horror stories of stolen bags on Peruvian buses, claiming that this was the easiest country to get your bag stolen in transit, and I was in no mood to test our luck.)

In the middle of the night, I woke up realizing that the bus had stopped.  A police officer was on the bus, right beside us, shuffling through some of the locals’ bags overhead and below in the dark with a small flashlight.  (He deftly avoided all the tourists bags, interestingly enough.)

He exchanged some words with a Peruvian woman behind us and then marched quickly up to the front bus.  He grabbed a bag down from the front of the bus and suddenly the woman bolted from the back, somehow making it over a 2 or 3-year-old child that was sleeping in the floor, and slamming Lauren in the back of the head.  She started screaming and crying hysterically and the police officer yelled back at her.

“Que pasa? Que pasa?” the other locals inquired.

Lauren and I looked at each other.  ‘Drugs?’ we wondered.  ‘Are they going to search all the baggage?  How long are we going to be stuck here?’

The police officer took the hysterical woman off the bus and the bus pulled forward, parking.  People got off and went to the bathroom on the side of the road.  (The women skillfully pulled up their skirts and managed to pee without exposing themselves.)  I thought ruefully about the fact that the travel agent had also promised us a bus with a toilet.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, the woman was back on the bus and we left without knowing exactly what had happened.  (We think she might have been smuggling stolen or imported goods and they took them.)

We barely slept later that night, particularly when we discovered the same woman snooping under our seat.  She said she was looking for a lost something, but we’re pretty sure she was trying to get into the bags of the tourist behind us, who had managed to sleep through the entire bus ride.

(Lauren: Beth may claim that she “barely slept”, but all those who know Beth know that this is not true. She was passed out. I was not sleeping at all, particularly after our little run in with the police, and sat angrily stewing about how tired I was. This is when I felt the woman feeling around under my seat, accidentally brushing my shoes with her searching fingers. I immediately jumped and asked her what she was doing (in Spanish somehow), waking up some of the sleeping Peruvians around us (and Beth). She held something out, saying she was looking for another one of whatever it was, and I said that there was nothing under the seat. She slithered back to her place in the back, only to start searching below the tourists’ seats behind us not long afterwards. I started to figure out how to say in Spanish, “You already got in trouble once with the police tonight, you wanna go for two?” and then thought that might fall under the “ugly American” category, and went back to stewing.)

We got into Cusco the next morning and swore off buying cheap tickets.  So for our bus ride out of Cusco to Lima, we spent US$40 on a semi-cama, tourist only bus.

We were impressed at the beginning.  At the private bus station, there was actually a section where you checked your bag (rather than carrying it to the cargo hold on the bus) and they stapled the receipts for your bags to the ticket, like at an airport.

It was slightly unnerving though that they hand-inspected carry-on baggage for weapons and filmed our faces before we got on the bus with a camcorder.  (I think it’s a hijacking deterrent…)

We had front, semi-cama seats in this bus, but as we started leaving the city, having a front-row view of the insane, curvey roads was not helping my motion sickness.  I popped a Dramamine and skipped the dinner that they served.  The hairpin curves were so intense that you couldn’t see any road in front of you – just the cliff that the bus was turning to avoid. Lauren got me a plastic bag, just in case.

About an hour into the ride, I was still nauseated, so I took another Dramamine.  Not two minutes after I swallowed it, I realized that I was going to lose it.  And I did.  Right into the plastic bag.  Along with the fish sandwich and beer I had for lunch.

Lauren proceeded to take a photo (see above) and then, with only a small amount of anger and indignation, she took the bag and went to the bathroom, where she ended up throwing it out of the window (she couldn’t find a trash can).

Later in the right, Lauren heard another girl throw up.  I missed it because to survive, I forced myself into unconsciousness… for the next 17, curvy, long hours.