FOOTNOTES Journal-ista Howard Scott got on a bus out of La Paz and discovered that getting there is definitely NOT half the fun.

La Paz to Coroico is officially the most dangerous road in the world. But as the old adage goes, the destination is sometimes less significant than the journey, or something. Leaving La Paz , these hardened minbuses driven by tired edgy-looking indians take you on a bumpy jaunt into the Andes. You're already four miles above sea level, which is enough to make you puke in the morning without the life-questioning hangover I was accompanying the day I went, but the road keeps climbing higher. The peaks rise above and around you like the prongs of a crown. Deeper into the Montagnes Negro it feels truly as if you're entering the mouth of a beast with drops and surges in rock like teeth. Like that scene in The Golden Child when Eddie Murphy has to carry a glass of water across treacherous precipices and crevices, our bus threaded its way along the mountain roads. I had a baby up in front of me that smelt like it'd already shit itself but its bowler hat wearing mother wasn't bothered. My girl at the time kept in her seat, chewing her pen like the whole tight squeeze of the minibus was perfectly normal and the fact we were on a seven hour mission along the lines of near-certain death was all normal too. She's sitting there writing in her journal. I'm sitting there wondering if it might be her last entry. Not that I was scared; Just damn fucking uncomfortable. The tales of an average of one bus crash a week didn't bother me as much as the Hellish stench emanating from that toddler hanging out of a knapsack on his mother's back. Bolivia. Good grief. The bus bombed along, banging over rocks and dunking into pits and holes in the ground.

It was about to get worse before it got any better. Aready wearing a bastard aguadiente hangover that blistered my tortured eyes and head like I was one of those rocks getting trampled under by the wheels of the bus, the bus now pulled up and on jumped a whole load of Israeli's. Surely there was no space already. Whatayagonnado? The door lay open while they lingered, eyeing up the two spare seats that appeared when the driver pulled out an indigenous woman and dumped her roadside to accommodate the four newcomers. They gripped their packs like someone wanted their dirty clothes and shit souvenirs and harangued the driver to throw off another couple of passengers so they could get aboard. He refused. They refused to board. A standoff ensued, with the bus growing more impatient. The drivers shotgun sidekick squeezed up hard against the handbrake and gear-stick and patted the front seat to invite two of them up front but they wouldn't budge.
"We are four friends we have to sit together", they whined. They looked at the bus expecting someone to go up front for them. Cramp was shooting down my leg and the door beckoned open but I couldn't have got off through the throng if I'd wanted to. The Israeli's eyed everyone, expecting us to give it up for them. They started pointing at random people and a disgruntled grumble ensued in Spanish, English, French.
"But we are four friends..." Eventually I'd had enough.
"Just get on the fucking bus or fuck off and let us go." Others joined the protest and the guys finally squeezed on. The air was thin enough this height, but that bus had less air than the moon. We rolled on. An Italian kid alongside me was actually squatting on the floor due to the lack of space. It wasn't fun. I didn't know how long I could last. It felt like a car crash before the fact. Hangovers exemplify my bad sense of life-presence as it is. I'd get claustrophobic on a desert island with a 'gover, but this one with the aguadiente from the night before...My hip hurt, my back killed, my foot was worryingly dead, a numb feeling of cramp spread right up to my thigh, my head banged, my chest was caned from lack of oxygen and too many cheap fags, my heart beat like a hollow log in my ears. Travel fun. I heard my girlfriend's voice, 'be patient, it's all in the mind.' She was still sitting there chewing on her pen thoughtfully. It was ok for her, being a gent I'd given up precious inches to give her more space. I couldn't even turn my neck to check out the scenery it was that tight. I abandoned the bus to go day-dreaming.

I imagined the bus pulling over to let everyone off except me. I imagined staring into the sad faces of the child and mother. Through the window pane, I imagined my girlfriend crying in the dust from the screeching tyres leaving her behind. I fantasised about the Israeli's getting off and the bus leaving with their bags and me waving back at them as we took off. I imagined the driver getting shirty with people who wouldn't depart. I saw that Italian kid just as we pulled away and told the driver to hold up, we missed one, picking him off the dirty floor and throwing him off by the scruff of his collar. Then I transported myself, laid back with my limbs outstretched in a soft meadow of grass and flowers, dozing in the sun, opening the door of the world's biggest fridge, one that dwarfed me, dragging out giant ice creams, humungous choice drinks, discarding things that landed with avalanche shattering echoes that boomed across Alpine valleys; watching the earth shift in seismic shoulder barging across the way as I rolled off my socks and tickled my feet against daisies and wathed it all with a chilled beer that swished in my gut that had expanded to engulf anything that came near it. Everything immense and limitless. I rolled in the grass rubbing my face like a dog does its snout on the warm, new earth that was all mine, I had on the world's loosest pants that never clinged, a shirt that filled valleys and drenched off my arms like rivers; I crawled inside my hat and ran its interior circumference shouting and listening to the play back of my voice across the chasm of its brim. I bounced off the walls of a plastic castle of SolaSolew and let floating amoebas dance with me and gently bong into me and spring me about the soft trampoline ground into wonderously empty air, I bounced sitting down to a stand-up and on my ass again and over and over and laughed when I landed on my head and without effort flipped the flop and bobbed on my back and then I took off through the meadow skipping and gliding my hands along the heads of grass and I span in Sound of Music circles hollering at the peaks that were all mine, all mine…and I awoke and I was crammed in a mini-bus and plundering a waterfall and overhanging cliffs and stallactites that hung from the mountain and I saw the wreck of a familiar looking bus down below and broken fences and heard the mutterings of some Hebrew argument.

Mmmm, I had dozed and managed to have a good dribble, which I couldn't move my wedged hands to wipe clean off my chin. I managed to wriggle around in my seat enough to be able to look out the window next to me and straight down a sheer vertical drop, what seemed thousands of metres down. Strangely enough, and thrillingly, the gulley was rushing in the wrong direction and, disorientated, I realised slowly that we were reversing. By now, a rush towards death down a cliffside in the Andes seemed preferable to slowly having your entire circulation shut off while being suffocated by the fumes of baby poo so I braced myself for the final plunge and tried to breathe a sigh of relief. My girl was explaining to someone beside her that the road is one-way in the direction of La Paz in the afternoon, forcing traffic toward Coroico to pull over beside the cliff and let the uphill traffic pass. I asked her the time. She said it was 10 past 10am. I said it was a fucking conspiracy designed to piss me off and cause grief in the mini-bus. She told me to shut it. I stared hard out of the window into the void; it stared hard back at me.