Day 14: Friday, April 18th, 2008 (Old Friends – Simon and Garfunkel)

Around four in the morning the bus arrived in Oruro. It was sad to say goodbye to my new friends. It had been a fun four days with them. It’s amazing how quickly you can get to know people. We said goodbye and the bus continued on.

6:59am – We are on the bus (flota) from Uyuni. We stopped in Oruro around 4am and Sydney, Naya, Katie, and Kilo got off and said goodbye. We are now just outside La Paz.

We got in to La Paz around eight. From the bus terminal we taxied down to the area we had stayed when I first arrived. We looked for a place Ranz had read about in his travel book, but couldn’t find it and ended up at a nicer hostel called the Maya that was just around the street from the artisan shops where I would be buying my souvenirs.

We couldn’t check in right away, so we left our bags and went and got some breakfast and took care of some errands (like getting money). The breakfast place was delicious. I had some quinua-filled pancakes which were so good. The place even played some American music (Guns ‘N Roses’ Sweet Child O’Mine).

12:39pm – We arrived in La Paz around 8am. We found a hostel Maya, but couldn’t get into our room until after 11am. We went and got money from the ATM and ate a nice breakfast with quinua pancakes. We then used the internet in our hostel lobby.

Once we got in our room, we used the bathroom and took hot showers (first time since last Saturday night*). We’re now heading out to grab lunch and buy souvenirs.

*Many of the hostels we stayed in on the tour had showers, but like lots of touristy things in Bolivia, there was a cost to use them. We had all agreed that if none of us showered, then we would all be gross together, so that’s what we had done and had saved our money.

We did our shopping and I got all the things I wanted. I bought some new headphones, but when I got back to the room I realized they were the wrong size adapter for the iPod.

5:30pm –We successfully bought souvenirs, then got pizza for lunch. We tried to change my flight for tomorrow to go straight to Columbus or Cleveland from Miami, but it would have been another $700, so we didn’t do it. We had a huge ice cream, then went and saw Cloverfield in a theater. It was in English with Spanish subtitles.

We just got back to our hostel and are going to go grab my bag from the bus terminal.

We walked back to near the bus terminal where the deliver post packages. After checking at a couple different desks under both of our names, we finally located the package and signed for it. Yippee! I wouldn’t have to leave anything behind.

We then walked back towards our hostel, but detoured through a bunch of street vendors and night activities that were going on. There was a lot of hustle and bustle as it was Friday night.

8:26pm – We got my bag and are now going to get food.

Although we had planned on having a “fancy” last meal, neither of us were really hungry because of our big pizza lunch and oversized ice cream (which we ended up giving what we couldn’t finish to a boy standing outside the ice cream shop), so we just went to a little café next to our hostel.

We talked about the trip and had some good conversation, but we were both pretty exhausted and went back to the hotel room and crashed.