Back from Huaraz

I just spent a week in the departmental capital, Huaraz. While the week there was fun, coming back from Huaraz was the real adventure. Our bus left at 1 pm, but Kendra (my site mate) and I both tried to fit too much into the morning. After doing some shopping and getting packed, I ate a hurried lunch (which I didn't have time to finish...so I was obviously already in a bad mood). I got back to the hostel just in time to pick up my stuff and run to the bus station so that I could get there late. But I also realized that I needed to use the bathroom, since I didn't want to poop my pants in the middle of a 3 ½ hour bus ride. And after that I decided to read War and Peace and The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Unfortunately Kendra had also done (too much) shopping in Huaraz so we needed to rent a mule caravan to carry the stuff to the bus station. But since we had no idea where, or if, we could rent those in Huaraz we decided to take a taxi. After lugging bags down a couple streets we did find a taxi which had to drive around town about three times to get us to the bus station since there is road construction everywhere in Huaraz right now.

This picture has absolutely nothing to do with my blog post today, but I felt like I shouldn't post something without pictures. Don't want to bore ya'll ;-) Btw, this is my host brother Mauricio, 7, and sister Daniela, 2.

Anyway, back to the story. When we finally arrived at the bus station in the taxi, we saw a bus leaving. We of course took the precaution of crossing our fingers, hoping it wasn't ours. Apparently we hadn't crossed our fingers hard enough though, because it was our bus. After unloading all of our stuff, paying the cab, and telling the people at the bus station our dilemma (there wasn't another bus for 5 hours) they told us we should just grab another cab and chase down the bus. Before we had time to say, “Seriously?” they were already out front looking to flag down a cab for us. They found one, explained to the cab driver where the bus was going and we climbed in and started our car chase (got to admit, kinda felt like I was in a movie if it wasn't for the fact that the chase involved a station wagon taxi pursuing an extremely slow dinosaur-esque bus to a soundtrack of uninspiring Quechua music in the taxi). When we caught up to it after about 5 minutes (yeah, those buses never make good time) the taxi passed the bus and pulled over along side the road so we could flag it down. They stopped to pick us up and even let us put our bags down underneath with the checked luggage. After the amazing service I received from the employees of the Paraiso bus company I was convinced that I would only use that bus line to go to Huallanca. Granted its the only bus line so I already knew that, but nonetheless I was still convinced ;-)