Taking the Long Road

The first time I saw pink dolphins in the Amazon, my friend and I were the only gringos on a bus heading towards the rainforest in Bolivia. Due to protesters staging road blockades around the country, the only open road to the town of Rurrenabaque was through Trinidad, a small city bordering the Amazon Basin. At the bus terminal, the driver assured us that we had time to grab our backpacks from the hostel across the street for the last bus to San Ignacio. But when we returned to the small terminal 5 minutes later the bus was already pulling out of its lane. We ran onto the bus without stowing our bags and squeezed our way to the back. But we weren't the only latecomers. As the bus crawled towards the terminal exit, more and more passengers jumped on. Everyone seemed to have assigned seating but us, and by the time we made it onto the main road, our new seats were on the floor in the aisle among our backpacks and other luggage from our fellow passengers. Less than an hour into the journey, the bus stopped, incoherent Spanish was spoken, and in a mad rush, our fellow passengers began crawling over bags and tourists in the aisle to exit. Bewildered, we followed the locals. They all went straight to the food stalls to buy the staple snack of fried chicken and papas fritas, and then followed the bus down the riverbank onto a loosely strung together raft with just enough wood to support vehicle tires. This left the human passengers to either balance precariously on thin upright 2x4 planks or stand in the river water that was flooding in. At the back, the bored looking raft driver controlled our ferry with an overworked and tiny sputtering motor. On the other side, a pump fought a losing battle to remove water from the raft. Getting off the bus was the safest way to cross the river, but given my experience with Bolivian safety standards, I think the chance of tipping must have been alarmingly high to have it enforced. Safely on the other side, we boarded the bus and continued on the bumpy dirt road for another 4 hours. Giving my butt a chance to recuperate from the unforgiving floor, I stood to admire the scenery of the pampas - a wetland groomed by big, floppy earred cows and a skyline dotted with magnificent trees. A splash caught my eye, and I noticed a pod of pink dolphins swimming and jumping along either side of the bus. I had no idea pink dolphins even existed, let alone in the middle of landlocked Bolivia. My aisle seat suddenly didn't seem so bad.