The detour

So after six taxi raides through northern Argentina and one eight hour bus ride through the middle of the night I am now safely in Santa Cruz. It was decided yesterday afternoon that the situation was most likely not going to resolve itself anytime soon. Actually, it got worse with talks between the government and campesinos breaking down and a few police and campesino confrentations involving tear gas. Not in Bermejo, but in a near by community. So at about 2:00 I was told I should leave ASAP becasue there was going to be a paro civico in Yacuiba the next day (a sort of protest when EVERYTHING shuts down) and then it would be really impossible to get to Santa Cruz. So I packed up my things and got on the road. Luckily I ran into some very helpful fellow travelers because I really didn´t know the best route to get through Argentina. I was planing on getting to the first destination and figuring it out from there. But luckily after crossing the bridge from Bermejo to Aguas Blancas, Arg. I shared a cab with another Bolivian that told me the fastest route to take and how much I should pay. Funny thing is that as we got to Oran he assumed I would pay for a third of the taxi fare! I was like what?? There´s two of us we split the fare, it´s that simple. I was pretty irritated at that point by this guy who was being really friendly to me the whole ride and giving me all this helpful ¨advice¨ then trying to rip me off. And then he goes on to ask me where I live. I make up some fake general location. Then he asks what family I live with (this kind of thing happens A LOT) and I ask him why he wants to know that. And he says he´s going to be in Bermejo the next weekend and he´ll look for me. Is he really thinking we´re going to hang out or something? I tell him I wont be home next weekend and he says well I come to Bermejo a lot I´ll look for you. Alright...you do that. It was kind of wierd. I didn´t get any kind of creepy vibe from him the whole time we were talking. Usually I´m pretty good at sensing those things. Who knows? Maybe he could just be innocently interested in the gringa or... maybe he´s a pervert. You never know. And as a woman over here you always got to keep you´re guard up. This whole subject is definitely worthy of it´s own lenghty blog. I´ll get around to that eventually. But anyway... he saw that I got on the right taxi and told the driver to make sure I got on the right taxi next. In the next taxi I meet up with two other friendly travelers (one was actually headed to Santa Cruz too) that actually insisted to pay a little more for the cab fare, because they were in a hurry and didn´t want to wait for other passengers. He was a total live saver at the absolutely packed Yacuiba bus station finding two miracle seats on a flota that was just about to leave the station. ¡¡¡ Corre Corre!!! (RUN!) As I mentioned before, if we didn´t get on a bus that night we would have been screwed! And we split a cab in Santa Cruz and he made sure I got to my hotel alright. It is nice to meet a genuinely nice person that doesn´t try to hit on you and ask you for your number or where you live. Tomorrow morning I leave for Coch. I´ll be a little late for the meeting, but I´ll be there. I can´t wait to see all my friends and share all our crazy stories. Hopefully by the time I get back to Tarija all this craziness will have blown over...

Here I am stuck in Bermejo with NADIE!

The realities of living in Bolivia are starting to sink in... I am scheduled to fly out of Tarija tomorrow evening for a Natural Resources/ Environmental Education project meeting and then our IST (in service training) meeting the following week in Cochabamba. I wanted to go up to Tarija today and do some last minute work on my presentation in the office. Problem is that between Bermejo and Tarija there are at least six different bloqueos (people blocking the roads with rocks, trees, cars and anything else they can get there hands on). These bloqueos have been going on all over the country lately (with bloqueos longer than two weeks in the Chaco clearing recently). Usually we´re spared from these kinds of things in Tarija because Tarijeños usually don´t seem to get too worked up about any one cause and give up after a day or two. But these bloqueos have been going on for about a week...making travel a huge pain in the ass, if not impossible. This bloqueo couldn´t have worse timing! The only time when I absolutely need to get to Tarija! The whole time I´ve been here there have been no problems (unless you count the mayors office being shut down for over two weeks exactly when I wanted to talk to a bunch of poeple for information to include in my diagnostic...oh well!! When I asked poeple is the Alcaldia atill closed. They would repy ¨yeah there are still problems¨. Uh... how are they going to work out their problems if no one´s working? I seem to be the only one with this mentality.) The governor of Tarija wanted to ¨peacefully¨ break up the bloqueos becase they´ve been going on for so long, but becuase the campesinos have the support of the MAS party Evo says it would be illegal to forcibly prevent the campesinos from blockading. So here I am...stuck in Bermejo when everyone else is getting ready to leave for Coch. Hopefully they will come to some resolution pronto, beacuse if I am the only one to miss my IST and the chance to see all my friends after three months of not seeing them I´m going be really bummed!