Arriving in Bolivia and Santa Cruz

We arrived in Corumba in the late afternoon and walked into the centre to find a cheap hotel. It was Sarah's birthday so we wanted to find a fancy restaurant, but the town is very small, and so the best place in town wasn't much to write home about. It was nice though and had a good atmosphere with a two-piece band playing local music. We were joined after dinner by an English guy James that we'd met on the Pantanal trip (where he had been joined by his parents), and he too was planning to make his way across the border and catch the train to Santa Cruz.

So the next morning we know we have to make our way back to the bus station to get our passports stamped and we met a German girl heading the same way from our hotel. Luckily she spoke really good Spanish, and so she organised all the various buses and stuff that we needed to sort out while we just followed her about. This basically involved a bus from the centre to the bus station, passport stamped (after the office opened 45 minutes late - apparently the Brazilians don't have much respect for the Bolivians), a bus back to the centre, a different bus to the Brazilian border, walk across the river/border, passport stamped on the Bolivian side, taxi from Bolivian side of border to the train station, and finally get train tickets for later that afternoon. It all went very smoothly though I have to say, no delays or any problems at all.

So then it was the train to Santa Cruz - a 22-hour affair that we all expected to be quite exhausting. In fact it would have been OK I think, but I ended up having the worst seat in the whole train carriage. I was sitting right in front of the carriage door, which would have been OK if not for the endless stream of people selling food and drinks. These local people just walk up and down the train selling their stuff, but unlike at home with the food trolley, they don't go past just once, they continuously walk up and down the length of the train for hours, and there are loads of these people, all basically selling the same kind of snacky stuff. The problem was that the door was literally three feet in front of my face and it was constantly being opened and closed while the sellers brushed against me to get through the door, or often the door wasn't closed properly (in which case I'd have to close it for them), or else the door latch wouldn't catch properly (in which case I'd have to lean forward to fix it and then close the door). And if I extended my knee too far the door would hit it and threaten to take my kneecap off. I had changed seats with the German girl so that I could sit opposite the aisle from Sarah - BIG mistake! Even the local Bolivian guy sitting next to me was being driven mad by the constant door opening/closing thing - he was a really nice guy in fact, and even offered to swap seats at one stage.

Eventually I got to move seats to sit beside a very strange young Australian guy who was hitching his way around South America on an incredibly small budget, and after chatting to him for ages I managed to get quite a few hours sleep before a guy got on board who had booked that seat (the centralised computer booking system seems to be quite sophisticated). So I had to return to my original seat - but by this stage it was the middle of the night, and so the food sellers weren't so common. The following morning they started again though, and so the last few hours were the same routine.

The train is often called the 'Death Train' by the way, a reference to the 1980's when it was far more chaotic and people used to fall off the roof and die or something, but cringingly backpackers still refer to it by it's old name and they all seem to think the name is really 'cool' - sigh!

Anyway, once in Santa Cruz we got a local bus (followed shortly by another local bus, this time the correct one - the German girl's Spanish saving the day again!) to the centre of town and checked out a few hostels. We got a great cheap place very near the main square (on Avenue Santa Barbera) and, as usual, ended up staying a few days. Santa Cruz is a nice town with a very pleasant central plaza and so easy enough to relax in.

The plan was to make our way South to the famous Salt Flats, and the options where a really cheap and long bus journey, or a very short direct flight. But 120km down the road South is a famous town called Samaipata that was supposedly well worth a look. Being only 2.5 hours away I reckoned it would be a shame to miss it, so we decided to get a shared taxi there.