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...