Nosiness -The beauty of curiosity.

I was in a hurry. I had no money or time and I knew it was my only chance to visit the world's largest salt dessert. I had five days to get there and return to Chile and it was thirty hours away. That, and the name of Uyuni’s Salar, was the only information I had about my destination.
I got the e-mail I had been waiting for. "The Chilean International Cooperation Agency has authorized your absence of the country for five days". The clock was ticking. I packed my stuff and half an hour later I was heading to the airport with a friend. We were hoping to catch one of those cheap last minute flights but we didn’t find any, so back from the airport we stopped at the bus station. It was late and almost every ticket office was closed. We bought two tickets going somewhere north but we still didn’t know exactly how to get to Bolivia.
We travelled all night and the next day finally arrived to Calama. We heard that buses from there crossed to Bolivia but we needed to find out when and from where. It was past midnight when the bus dropped us in the middle of nowhere but we managed to get to Calama’s bus station. When we arrived and asked for directions nobody knew what Uyuni was and they told us we had to leave the place because they were about to close.
So there we were, in the middle of a cold night, two lost travelers without people to ask for directions and without internet. We did it the old way and walked to a police station to ask for information. The police officers, who are known in Chile as Carabineros, finally told us where the bus to Uyuni departed from. Luckily we were just a couple of blocks and hours away from it. The issue then was where to spend those hours while we waited for the bus. We end up killing time at the waiting room of a medical clinic.
When we walked into the hospital, the seats were full of sleeping homeless people, and for the first time in my life I realized what it feels like to try to find a place just to rest for a while and protect yourself from the wind and a cold night. During the hours we spent there people with bloody faces arrived, police cars appeared and pulled out prisoners with chained arms and feet and a mother’s declaration to the carabineros took place a few steps from us. She was waiting for news about her son that had been almost killed by her husband.
Finally we made it. I don’t know how we managed to stay awake until it was time to get the bus to Uyuni but I do know what I learned that night about real life.