Plane, Taxi, Combi, Schoolbus?

So these last two days have been filled with interesting travel stories.  It is not so much about what I saw, as much as it was about how I got there.  It all started when Jason and I tried to find a combi that would take us from Puno to Juliaca to get to the airport on Friday morning.  We had decided that we wanted to see the Chulpas (ancient Incan funerary towers which lie between the two cities), and so our plan was to take a combi to the halfway point, take a collective taxi to the Chulpas, stop and see the Chulpas quickly enough to to take some pictures and see some surrounding scenery, take another collective taxi back to the main road where we would hail another combi to take us to Juliaca, and then take one final taxi to the airport from the bus stop. A lot of taxi/combi hopping, right?  Definitely true, but we are young and ambitious with our time.

A mesa in the middle of an Andean lake

So back to the story.  At the beginning of the day, Jason and I asked for directions to the combi stop from the hostel, and were given right directions to the wrong set of combis. That was the first of the delays, but it wasn´t so bad because we found a bus that was going to Juliaca and climbed aboard.  What we didn´t realize; however, is that this bus would stop every block until we got out of Puno to get more passengers. Let´s just say we have had faster.  After that, we got to our next stop and the Chulpas without any problem, but once at the Chulpas we realized that we only had 20 minutes that we could spend there. Due to our time crunch we asked the taxi driver if he could wait for us because the taxis in the area can be sporadic. He agreed to our surprise and we quickly headed up the hill toward the ruins. Along the way, we ran into a group of school children who saw us and got excited to see "gringos." If you travel to Peru and happen to have blonde hair or blue eyes, it is important to know that you will be seen as a novelty almost everywhere.  Anyway, after the school children ran into us, we decided it was time to head back to our cab, but lo and behold, the cab driver was gone and thus we had no ride.  At this point we began to get nervous because we still weren´t near Juliaca and our departure time was coming closer and closer.  After a few minutes of discussing our options, Jason and I  finally decided to ask the school bus driver of the school group if we could hitch a ride with them.  He said yes, and there was my first and probably what is going to be my strangest hitch hiking experience.  I mean, how many people can say they have hitch hiked in a Peruvian school bus in the Andes?  I feel like that is as strange as they come.  From that point on we got to the main highway fine, but then ran into our next snag: no combi that we hailed would pick us up.  After about 6 passed us, we decided that we should start walking to the checkpoint a half mile away, and it was then that a combi pulled over and picked up a local family behind us. We turned around and made large gestures to hail the driver, and luckily this time it worked.  We were on our way.  When we arrived in Juliaca, we got off the combi and tried to do what we thought was going to be the easiest part of our trip: hail a taxi.  In Lima this is no problem because taxis are everywhere and often times try to hail you with their car horns, but in Juliaca it was a different story.  Every taxi either passed us by or told us that they had already recieved a call to pick someone else up.  Around this time is was 11:40 am and our flight was at 12:35 pm. We found ourselves rideless and running against the clock.  Out of desperation, I asked a random woman from the street if she knew where we could pick up a cab, and to my surprise she actually offered to stand with us and hail one for us.  So there we were, two American college students standing with a Peruvian woman and her child trying to hail a cab. It was a sight for sure.  Unfortunately it didn´t work, but we did find a combi, shortly after, that was going to the airport.  We said goodbye to our new found friend and scrambled on.  The time was now 11:50, the flight was leaving at 12:35, and the combi driver told us that it would take 20 minutes to get to the airport.  Wow did we cut it close!  But somehow we made it and were able to breath a sigh of relief on the plane.  That seems like there were plenty of issues for one day on its own, but the adventure didn´t stop there.  One last surprise waiting for us. When I got off the plane I forgot my jacket and a permanent water bottle in a white bag on the plane, and security wouldn´t let me go back and grab it.  Instead they told me that I would have to pick it up the next day. That was a big problem for me because I had my flight to Chile at 6:45 pm that night and needed that water bottle for patagonia.  Jason waited with me for a while, as we tried to get it resolved, but I finally told him to go because he had a test that afternoon and I didn´t want him to be late.  Two hours later I finally got my stuff back due to the hard work of one of the airport employees.
It was one crazy day!  Even with all the chaos, there was one thing that became clear to me: God must have definitely been looking out for us. We had a lot of snags, but we also had a lot of "luck" between well timed people in the right places and random good samaritans. It was just one of those moments, where you look back and you just marvel at the good things that were provided.

Patagonia sky

Now I am in Patagonia, and it is amazing.  It is actually a lot like Alaska here, and because it is summer, the sun doesn´t set till 11:30 pm!  We had a lot of rain today, but the countryside is none the less beautiful. Unlike Alaska; however, it is not all mountainous.  There is  a good portion of it that is rolling hills filled with pastures and forests.  Tomorrow I head out into the wilderness with a trekking group and won´t be back until Thursday.  I am pretty sure that I won´t have internet, so I will see when I can update you guys next.  Until then!