I thought it was strange that there was no one in the kitchen making breakfast when I went to brush my teeth (in the shared bathroom) at 04:45am as breakfast was due to be at 5am. I mentioned it in passing when I got back to the room and Jeanine joked about the fact that the previous night she had bet that we wouldn't leave before 7am.
Then a little after 5am Israel was banging on a door down the hall, clearly without much success as about 10 minutes later he told us that the lady who was supposed to be making our breakfast had overslept and that we would get breakfast at the Hot Springs which was going to be our first stop of the day followed by the Geysers and then the Green Lake before being dropped at the border for our crossing in to Chile.
Shortly after that I commented that I hadn't seen any of the drivers and Richard went to see if he could find them, returning five minutes later having seen no sign of them. A few minutes later I went to see if I could find Israel or the drivers to find out what the plan was.... no sign of anyone..... It's important to remember that we were in the middle of the desert more than 2 hours from the border with Chile and 8 hours from Uyuni with no mobile or radio communication....
As I was about to go back in to the refuge a 4X4 pulled up with six people in it, I was looking to see if I could see our drivers in the car when the driver got out and stumbled towards me saying "Tienes un Problema?" (Do you have a problem?) I responded sarcastically saying "do I have a problem?" and then realised that probably wasn't the best thing to do, he was falling down drunk, as it turns out were all of the other drivers who quite literally fell out of the car behind him.
Then I'm not quite sure what happened next but our driver from the previous day walked up to Israel our guide and poured a can of beer over his head, Israel lamped him and then there was blood everywhere and we changed from tour group in to UN peace keeping mission trying to negotiate a good outcome for everyone - it's not easy to negotiate with angry drunks.
Ben, Emanuelle and Martin took the lead in trying to negotiate our collective way out of the situation,
Abs, Phoebe and I walked the length of the refuge (four other buildings) asking if any cars were going to Chile with spaces but there weren't any. Then we found two men at the end of the block who we offered $300 dollars to but they claimed not to have any petrol.
Ben, Emanuelle and Martin, in between stopping the fighting offered to drive the cars themselves, tried to bribe the drivers and at one point we seriously talked about the possibility of tying the drivers up (I am not joking) and taking the cars.
Eventually another tour group who were on their way to Uyuni offered us their driver to take us to Chile and then return to take them on their tour which was incredibally kind, they were 'paying it forward'.
The two hour trip to the border was quite stressful, there were too many people in it, there was too much luggage on the top of it and the driver was going too fast which made for some hair-raising moments on the bends. I don't think any of us thought we were going to make it, apart from Martin who in his lovely Swiss way kept trying to help everyone through the trip.
With the border in sight we breathed a collective sigh of relief but when we pulled up, the bus driver who coincidentally was our 4x4 drivers boss insisted that we pay $200 and he spoke to the border police who wouldn't stamp us out of Bolivia until we'd paid it - we initially thought it was a scam but it wasn't it. Any way to cut what is becoming a long story short we paid our money, got stamped out of Bolivia and arrived in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, somewhere that I'm really looking forward to.......
 UN Peacekeeping Mission |
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Raine x
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