The man who makes false teeth didn’t really care too much for our predicament with the train, and he finally arrived at 10:15am. Once it was strapped in, we were on our way to the station for the 11am bus to Oruro. Now we were really counting on the national trend of being late for everything.
The bus winds excruciatingly slowly up and out of La Paz, fighting through the traffic, dusty roads and kamikaze pedestrians. Finally we leave the city, and tumble towards Oruro.
Roadworks and tolls for unfinished and bumpy highways slow us down further. Hopes start to dash, but then Oruro appears on the horizon, and it is only 3:20pm. Maybe we can make this. Out of the bus and into a taxi. Unfortunately, the moment you want the raster from crazy taxi, or Jason Strathom to be behind the wheel, you know you have the kid that was bullied at school, and still has a nervous complex. So, instead we arrive at 3:50pm, ten minutes after the train has departed (late!).
The station attendant then tells us that the train makes one stop, 120 km south, and if we take a collectivo, we should be able to catch it just in time. My friends would know that this kind of high octane opportunity is too hard for me to walk away from. So 10mins later, we are all stuffed into the back of a Toyota heading due south through fantastic scenery, chasing a train, again.
After an arduous journey, craning our necks to the horizon, looking desperately for our train, we arrive in Challapata. It is a ramshackle town, and the train station is nothing but a group of abandoned, dilapidated buildings, and some goal posts.
Usually, these mad dashes work out fairly well, but on this occasion we failed rather spectacularly and had to go back the way we came and spend the night in a less than desirable hotel under three wool blankets…
