So far, despite the reputation Bolivia has for strike and protest, our journey had gone relatively smoothly. Surely we couldn’t leave the country without a bit of drama?! Our last day we were back in Tupiza and set off around 2pm to the border city of Villazón. That was to take an hour and we should have been comfortably on Argentinian soil by 3.30-4pm. Or so we thought. We knew the word on the street was that there were protests but we were assured they were organised for another day. On arrival to Villazón we were again assured that the protests were another day but a new strike by the town workers was going on today and the border was blocked. Nice.

Apparently the Bolivians were pissed off because they were “losing their jobs”. Many of the Bolivians on the border made a business out of bringing things like flour across from Argentina and selling it on the Bolivian side. Believe it or not Argentina is in trouble (again?!) economically and even the Bolivians are taking advantage of their weak Argentinian peso. Nobody in Argentina can take out dollars and the dollars the foreigners bring in to the country are worth double on the black market when compared to the official rate in the banks.

So Buenos Aires tried to limit the amount of goods leaving the country by saying each Bolivian may take only 2 bags of goods across from Argentina (N.B. simple worker explanation). And so the Bolivians took to the border and demanded answers- on the very same day that two young europeans were hoping to cross is quickly and peacefully. At first we joined the protesters and thought it was quite funny but the colder and hungrier we got (we just changed all our money to pesos and had no bolivianos left) the novelty wore off. And the cold and angry bolivian mums with milkless babies and Argentinian hippies who couldn’t afford to sleep on the Argentinian side and millions of other people who just wanted to get home didn’t see the funny side either.

We deviced different plans to storm the border; Monika to distract the guards with her…umm…charms, Maja to be used as a human catapult, or just a plain old fashioned storming of the gates with our newly acquired French friends (we figured they are good at that revolution stuff). But in the end at 11.30pm they opened the border for 10 minutes and we all hurled ourselves across and just made it to the last bus to our first destination Humahuaca!! We were tired and exhausted but we were all in it together and we kept morale high and had a nice adventure to add to our Bolivia profile. El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!!
 

Novelty wearing off

So close but yet so far

Getting ready to run across

Finally with an Argentinian!

Welcome to Argentina 🙂