Bittersweet
One of the better life lessons that "the road" teaches you, is to be flexible. You're in this weird country, and you may or may not understand a word of the language around you, and all you see is chaos, no organization or whatsoever, and you feel the panic creeping up your spine. In a nutshell, for some reason we all love to travel to places where everything is just one big, hot mess. And that's where you learn most!
Our journey brought us to Sucre, the capital of Bolivia (one of the). The city is breathtakingly beautiful, the climate is perfect, the people are lovely, the food is delicious... Wait, was it? In fact, I don't know. The day we arrived the people decided to strike. A march, OK... With some fireworks, OK... And some yelling, sure... And blocked roads everywhere! WHY?! Because that's the way you strike in South America. If you want to make an impact, you block the roads.
They made a little mistake though. When they put the buses horizontally, diagonally and upside-down on every (e-ve-ry) corner of the street, they left a meter wide gap between bus and wall. So, what happened, people found their way through and got motorcycles to work as taxi's and life continued without any major disruptions. Well, that wasn't going to happen the next day! With less then 20 centimeters between car and wall the city was now officially blocked and locked. Great!
With no buses, taxi's or motorcycles, there wasn't all that much to do in sweet Sucre - perfect when you're travelling and trying to "get to know" a place. But what else can you do but hoping it will all pass soon. So there we found ourselves, seven days in a row, sitting in a cafe, waiting, drinking coffee and playing Yahtzee (I know, it sounds thrilling)... However, the best Gringo Spot in town was a great place to meet fellow locked-up-abroad-travelers. While sharing stories and experiences and trying to find whatever way to get out of this place, our hopes quickly melted like snow in the sun, when we met some of them just arriving and without a clue of what was going on... (they were dropped of by their bus, out of town, and had to walk into town, for about 15 kilometers, with their pretty little backpacks on their backs - and that's when they realized that they did bring too much stuff with them).
The days went by and unexpectedly enough, after trillions of games of Yahtzee we got booooooooooored! So, we wanted to get out and found a taxi who "knew a way". Our dear friend was willing to take us for about four times the regular price to Potosí. Deal. Done. Take us! Turned out, he didn't really know a way, so after crossing a couple of private properties, seeing the edges of the cliffs a little too close, and inventing roads... we made it to Potosí.
PS: two weeks later, one of our friends wrote saying he had met people who had walked TWO DAYS in order to leave Sucre.
Road lessons learned: take every opportunity you get, laisser faire when it comes to plans, schedules and itineraries, and never, never leave the house without Yahtzee.