After landing back in Santa Cruz, we crossed our fingers as we walked out to where we had parked the car, paid our absurdly cheap parking fee for a month of parking at the airport, and began our drive back to Santa Cruz, as the airport was north of Santa Cruz, and our journey was taking us south. The only particularly notable thing driving back into Santa Cruz was that the police did not stop us on the way in. This was quite the relief actually, because we had to drive past the same highway police station that stopped and fined us for not having a fire extinguisher on the way out to Buena Vista about a month earlier. Though I was pretty sure if we got stopped again it would just be another fine, I, for one, did not want to find out about any kind of increased penalty for making the same violation and having to talk to the same police officer about it.
Anyway, we got back to Santa Cruz and returned to our trusty old hostel, but it was full so we were sent to the slightly-jenkier-yet-no-less-cheap-hostel around the corner. We spent a few more nights there than originally planned to recover from being jet-lagged. Santa Cruz has some decent street markets so I did some gift shopping for people, made some epic fruit salads, and had some of my first very sketchy street meats that would become a theme of Bolivia. Not that the meat ever made me (too) sick, but it was BBQ steak chunks on a grill that clearly hadn't been warm for several hours, and it sold for 14 cents, which is cheap even by Bolivian standards. I climbed to the best view in Santa Cruz! It was amazing (wink, wink ;) ! You climb up three stories to a church bell tower so you can see the 1-2 story white rooftops of Santa Cruz's urban sprawl. Really, its hard to sell it as a "view", but I got suckered into paying the 28 cents for it, and to be honest it was one of the most exciting things we discovered in all of Santa Cruz. In the few days we stayed there, I became a regular at some cafe with mean salteña empanadas, and drank about a gallon of freshly pressed orange and grapefruit juice. Probably the most useful thing we did was finding a huge market for car things in the area of town with all the mechanics and bought our necessary fire extinguisher as well as some window wiper blades because it turns out Alejandro was not properly equipped for rain.
We eventually found our way back to the main highway out of town, extinguisher readily available in the back seat, kind of low on gas, and headed for our next destination, Samaipata! Along the way we passed by the Paceña factory, the Bolivian equivalent of Budweiser, and then got to some pretty jungle-y mountainous terrain. It was gorgeous and super fun to drive, almost fun enough to make us forget about the low gas situation. Seriously though, this was THE highway that went through Bolivia, like the I-5 of California and there wasn't a gas station on the way out of town (or at least not one with cheap gas, I can't really remember). Based on the mileage to Samaipata, I was certain we were not going to make it without getting gas, and just as the gauge went below E we started having to climb a pretty big hill. I'm trying to coast as much as possible and beginning to wonder what AAAs Bolivian coverage is, because we were in the middle of nowhere and it didn't seem like the kind of place where camping on the side of the highway was very Kosher. But, just as I was staring at the speedometer trying to calculate the minimum amount of speed reduction needed to make the next curve without losing traction but without wasting any momentum, out of the corner of my eye I saw a half hidden sign behind a tree in front of some guys house that read "hay gasolina". So I pulled over to the side of the road, told Acacia what I had seen, then found the sign to confirm it wasn't a phantom "hay gasolina" sighting. We kind of poked around this guys house until he came out and then I asked for gas. He brought out all the gas he had, which was 12 liters stored in 6 2 liter soda bottles.
We filled
