Disaster

"Your number will come up at some point," my thesis advisor told me last May. At some point, disaster strikes: Jim (my advisor) had just recounted how during a year of travelling Eurasia, a motorcyclist had ridden off with all of his stuff near the Taj Mahal in India. I think both of us considered ourselves smart travellers, but at some point, something disastrous happens, even if it is completely preventable.

Yesterday was my number came up. I lost my camera, three lenses, four memory cards, all worth about $1600 USD. I think my travel insurance can pick up $500 of it, and I will of course have to buy a new camera soon (likely in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, known for its cheap duty-free electronics).

Here's what happened. I was scheduled to take a 6 pm bus from La Paz to Uyuni, a town in the south of Bolivia on the way to Paraguay. The bus was late, and the office workers said it would leave at 645 (no bus leaves on time in Bolivia), so I sat down in the terminal to wait. In general, bus terminals are pretty dodgy areas, and I didn't discount the La Paz bus terminal. At any rate, an English girl asked me to watch her bags while she went to the bathroom, and I did so. When she came back, I did the same, she watched my bags while I went to the rest room. When I came back the first thing I said was "where's my camera bag?" It's pointless to blame anyone, and I'm not even sure that the camera bag was there when I left for the bathroom -- it could have easily been snatched while I was guarding everything. I looked all around, asked everyone in the area, and went to the police office, knowing that it was gone. Nobody who steals a camera is going to hang around the same area.

Mostly, I just felt pathetic and stupid for letting this happen. I wasn't held up at gunpoint, I managed to make it through Lima without any such incidences (where foreigners constantly hear horror stories), and this really shouldn't have happened.

To make matters worse, I got sick for the first time since touching down in Lima on the 12 hour bus ride to Uyuni. The bus driver refused to stop for seven hours, and then at about hour 10, the bus broke down on the dirt road to Uyuni. To make matters worse, it was literally freezing -- windows icing up -- and the windows wouldn't stay shut. Eventually we got to Uyuni after about 14 hours on the bus.

I'm trying to get to Ciudad del Este, next to the Brazilian and Argentinean border (and the splendid Iguazu Falls) by next week, which will involve a series of buses through Chile and Argentina. I've taken buses in Chile and have been quite impressed, and have heard similar good things about Argentinean buses as well. Wish me luck!