"A journey is like marriage, the certain way to be wrong is to think you control it", said John Steinbeck...
I took a night bus from Sucre to Santa Cruz, 15 hours... Unfortunatley, buses in Bolivia are not as confortable as in Argentina (although they are much cheaper!)... and the lack of pavement on the road is the main reason for this.
In my experience, those 15 hours were horrible! I started to feel a bit of fever... and later stomach ache too. A diarrhea infection was coming... and that made me rememeber the fried chorizo sandwhich that I had that day for lunch! then I knew it wasn't a good idea to eat that... The continuous bumping of the bus didn't help my pain much... and of course, I didn't sleep either. As the pain in my stomach grew stronger, I once had to make the bus to stop, so that I could "release" part of the pain...
I arrived to Santa Cruz in the morning and went directly to a hostel. I laid down in bed... with 38ºC of fever, with dhiarrea, and very tired of the 15 hours in that bus. I didn't eat for the whole day... just took some medicament and hoped to recover. The following day I wasn't much better, I took a bit of breakfast and at night went out to search for dinner..
My hostel was in the center of town, but it was sunday, nothing was opened, streets were empty... and I couldn't find any restaurant... At night, alone, sick and very hungry is how I started to "explore" the city... I felt like a zombie walking in the streets of Resident Evil!... but I remained calm as much as I could, stressing out was not going to solve the problem... Finally, in the very center of the city, the main square, I found an irish bar which served food. So there I went and ordered a salad... but my hunger had to wait for 30 more minutes till the food was ready... Finally, I recovered very well soon after that, and next day I was fine...
And then I discovered that Santa Cruz is not a touristic city, it's just a poor big city with very few interesting things to do, so there are no tours, and very few tourists, and so very few chances to meet them... so did I came here by mistake? no, I came for a reason, and I'll tell you that later...
But as usual, I like to see things in a positive way... "what doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger"... After this reality check, I will apreciate more when things are good, and also when things are normal... after all, if you have health and you have food, the rest of your problems are just secondary.
