Going Home

After bumming around Purmamarca for a while, we caught the bus to Jujuy (pronounced: who who E ) wandered all over the downtown looking for our hostel, got some food, and settled in for the night.

We hoped to do a horseback riding excursion the next day, but they turned out to be too expensive. When we arrived in Jujuy I began to realize that Courtney was getting a bit road weary. When we left for Salta the next morning I realized it might be best just to catch the next bus to Paraguay, instead of staying in Salta for the night. We arrived around 2pm, the next bus was a 4:30pm. We bought our tickets and used the two hours to take the gondola ride to the top of a hill offering us lovely views of the city. We hoped the bus after that and were on our way home.

The bus ride back turned out to be a real pain in the ass actually. The road between Salta and Resistencia is surprisingly rough, which made it difficult to sleep. They also decided to play some of the worst movies ever made. One was called Yeti. I think a 14 year old boy wrote and directed it. It was terribly and nonsensically violent. I was listening to an audiobook instead of the movie, but it was so amazingly bad the Courtney got my attention and told me I absolutely had to watch it. So it did, and it was terrible.

To make things even worse the movie started to replay after we watched it the first time. I gave them a few minutes to notice, or for someone to inform them it was on again, but it continued to play. I went downstairs and told the bus attendant, who promptly changed it to Forest Warrior, a 1990’s Chuck Norris movie. Chuck Norris plays a forest sprit who help a group of kids save a mountain from a logging company. Basically FernGully in live action Chuck Norris style. It had Chuck in it, ergo it was awesome, or at the very least an improvement upon the previous film.

Around midday we stopped for almost three hours because some people were blocking the road doing some sort of protest. It took them that long to figure out it would be best to just back that bus up and take the 20 minute or so detour around the protesters. After we finally got moving we picked up a group of people from what I would guess was a bus that broke down. This meant I finally had to share the seat next to me. This was unfortunate because I realized there was something resembling vomit a little too closely under my seat. I discovered it after stepping in it with one shoe, putting the shoe up on the seat, resting my leg where my shoe had been, and feeling a wet spot. EWWWWWWWWWWWW. Thankfully it didn’t smell and I had plenty of tissues to cover it up. It was far enough back that I could avoid it when I wanted to, which was good because someone decided to sit in the seat next to me when we picked up the extra bus of people.

After a long while we got to Clorinda, the city on the other side of the river from Asuncion. There weren’t any buses that went from Salta all the way to Asuncion. We missed the stop at the bridge to go through customs and ended up at the normal bus terminal. So we, and two Swedish girls who were also going to Paraguay that we adopted, took a taxi back to the bridge. Finally we stamped out of Argentina, stamped back into Paraguay, and caught a van back to the capital.

I have to say, it was really nice to be back in the ‘guay. I missed the Guarani. I didn’t miss the dirtyness, but the familiarity of it was nice. I liked being some place I recognized again.

That evening Courtney and I went out with the Swedish girls, and the taxi driver tried to charge us 60mil instead of 40mil. Ahh yes, its good to be home.