Michael: Wishing for the good things at home

I suppose it’s true for anyone who travels. There always seems to be one day when in spite of all the fun, exploration, and discovery, there comes a day when a traveler really, and I mean REALLY wants to be home – home where friends, family, and familiarity are. This morning this happened to me.
I awoke with – How you say in your country? – a loose stool. Yes, diarrhea. We were scheduled for a 7-hour bus ride from Cochabamba to La Paz. I took my second testimonial 45-minutes later at the bus terminal, paying the equivalent of $0.13 for the privilege of crouching over a seat-less toilet and for a strip of toilet paper. I hoped all would be well and with my team I boarded the bus.
Around about an hour later, and I don’t want to get too graphic here, liquidy things in my midsection began to assert themselves. Now mind you, we were on a modern, double-decker Mercedes coach bus. So I wandered down the stairway and asked for the baño, only to be told that there wasn’t one (or that the one the bus had didn’t work). “How long to the rest stop?” “Tres horas.” Ho-my-gosh!
I returned to my seat to contemplate my fate. A Bruce Willis action film came on the monitors, the volume on high, dubbed and sub-titled both in Spanish. Now mind you, the movie system worked but the bathroom didn’t.
I tried to take in the scenery outside the window, which was spectacular, as the road climbed steadily further than I ever thought possible, gaining thousands of feet in elevation. The slight headache that often accompanies rapid movement towards high altitudes competed for my attention with the grumbling in my gut. Minutes passed like hours as I dreamed of clean restrooms back in the good old USA, with all the toilet paper anybody could ever use and actual toilet seats. I was as uncomfortable as I have been in a long, long time.
The movie mercifully ended and the road leveled out to the Altiplano, the high plain, which is characteristic of Bolivia. Finally, the bus turned into the dirt parking lot of a “rest area,” a restaurant flanked by men’s and women’s bathrooms in outbuildings, where I was never so happy to pay $0.13 again to relieve my pain.
As we continued on, we were treated to an even more violent movie (I didn’t know there was such a thing) but by now I was able to read a book and look out the window at the emerging snow-capped giant mountains. We hit the outskirts of La Paz 45-minutes before arriving at the bus terminal where we were met by Pedro Loza, the leader of the inbound team. It was a good sign that the happy times would renew.