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So after splashing about with colorful fish on the river tour in Bonito and catching up on sleep in the ghost town, we hopped backed onto another bus, rapidly becoming our second home, for the journey up to the border. Once there, we had to mooch about for whilst waiting for the immigration office to open (because everything closes at lunch time in South America, apparently nothing is more important than food...fair enough) so we found yet another all you can buffet and stuffed our faces, an alarming regularity in our South American culinary habits. Anyway so once we got our stamps done and organized transportation with one of the many companies at the bus terminal waiting to pounce on clueless tourists, we cruised over the border hassle free and via various prearranged taxis and bus shuttles, got to the train station in Bolivia. Now the train that takes you from the border to Santa Cruz is known as the Death Train, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence, because it often derails. Excellent! In fact it had just recently gone off the tracks the week before. But you know being the adventurous chaps we are we hopped on at a canter. The train was indeed a rusty bucket of beaten down carriages with worn down interiors and rickety doors (that made sleeping a pain in the arse). And when it got going, it was not difficult to see why it derails half the time because the carriages were swaying left and right all over the place and creaking and screeching so loudly that you thought the whole thing was going to fall apart at any minute. Plus to make things worse, it stops every hour or so in these villages so that kids can jump on and cruise up and down the isles shouting at the top of their lungs trying to sell you various crap. So it wasn't the most pleasant or relaxing ride of my life, but by that point I had gotten used to knuckling down and grinding through these uncomfortable long-haul journeys. But this one was up there to take the cake no doubt. Funny incident, well it wouldn't have been funny had I actually done it. At some point during the night, the train had stopped yet again, only this time the usual barrage of little brats didn't appear. Then I heard this loud banging on the outside door at the intersection between 2 carriages. So being the closest, I got up to see what the deal was, and there was this guy outside banging on the door trying to get in. Having been half asleep and still in a daze with my brain functioning at about 2%, I just thought he was another bloke just trying to earn a penny selling his goods, so I went to let him in. As I was about to release the latch on the door, the ticket-man flew through the doors to the other carriage next to me shouting 'no no no!!'. This kind of gave me an unwelcome startle back into reality in my zombified state, so I asked him to relax and tell me what the problem was, in mumbled garbled Spanish. He then explained to me that the guy was a bandit and a group of them had stopped the train to try and sneak on and rob people. So I suppose that was a fairly legit reason to make me not open the door and return to my seat feeling stupid and embarrassed. Stupid f***ing tourist he must have thought. I chuckled at the time, but realistically who knows what could have happened if I'd opened it. Not my finest moment anyway. Anyway luckily the rest of the journey was relatively event-free and the train reached Santa Cruz without derailing or being hijacked by crafty Bolivian bandits. Woohoo!
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