The tiny nowhere town of Uyuni has two claims to fame: fantastic freshly-made pizza, and the world’s largest salt flats. It had been pointed out to me that, although it is at least eleven hours away, La Paz is the closest major city in the sense that it takes longer to get to Uyuni from anywhere else. Clearly, this was a golden opportunity.

I left La Paz Friday morning at 10 on a bus bound for Oruro, a smallish city at about the halfway mark. From there I would take the train. The bus was scheduled to stop at the Oruro train station, so the connection should have been easy. But ultimately it was not.

On the bus a woman sat down next to me and struck up conversation, kindly accommodating my horrific Spanish. In a slow, halting way we found out about each other. She is a book distributor dealing mostly in textbooks and technical literature. She sells to retail bookstores in La Paz, and also directly to schools and universities. She was on her way to Oruro to catch the train to Buenos Aires, site of a big international book fair during the coming week. She had friends with her, too—other book distributors from La Paz also headed to the book fair. In fact, theirs was the same train as mine. It continues south from Uyuni, over the Argentine border, and on to the capital.

We talked until the movie came on; after that we couldn’t. I can always count on being seated directly under a speaker. If possible, mine will be the broken, rattling and buzzing and hissing one. This has been true since Ghana and was true again on Friday. The real issue is the combination of excessive volume and poor-quality soundtracks of local movies. In this story, the main character had recurring visions, abruptly cut to, of a roaring tiger and of a deafening drum circle. It was unpleasant.

I put in my headphones and fell asleep. Sometime during the ride I was nudged awake by my neighbor, who told me something about Oruro. My Spanish was even poorer in that confused state; I really only heard the words for “problem”, “blockade”, and “train”. But I was awake enough to know I my options weren’t very good. They were: (1) Ask the bus driver to stop and let me out in the altiplano, that vast plateau of grassland full of nothing but thin air, brutal sun, and a driving prairie wind, where I could try to make alternate travel arrangements myself; or (2) Wait and see. I went back to sleep.

When I woke up we were closer to Oruro, and all the chatter on the bus was about the bloqueo. My neighbor told me more about it. Apparently the city’s residents were unhappy about a fare hike by the combi drivers. (A combi is a just like a Ghanaian trotro: a van whose insides have been gutted and replaced with bench seats to accommodate 13 passengers. It is used for public transportation.) Some routes which used to cost Bs. 1 ($0.15) now cost Bs. 1.50 ($0.22). While not a huge jump in absolute terms, the percentage increase was reason enough to drag out a bunch of sizeable rocks and break glass bottles. These hazards were organized into neat lines across all the main roads in the city, and made it impossible for vehicles to pass.

So eventually our bus came to a stop behind other buses and trucks, on a ring road that ran to the east of the city center. Beyond the bloqueo kids were playing soccer on the empty asphalt, and vendors selling ice cream and bread rolls pushed their carts, calling out to them and to the adults who leaned against the cement barrier in the middle of the road. Except for the kids, everyone looked bored. We were about four miles from the train station, and had a little less than an hour before departure.

My neighbor told me to come with her group—they had a plan, she said—and we stepped over the stones and the glass and began walking south. The women split off on a side street and I continued with the men. One of them was on his phone, furiously smoking cigarettes. He looked around in all directions. Just beyond the next bloqueo, about 300m down the road, a white pickup truck pulled up. The man with the phone raised his arms in triumph. We walked to the truck, got in, and took a winding tour of Oruro’s back roads, avoiding the rocks and broken glass and indifferent protesters. We were at the train station inside of ten minutes.

I thanked them as profusely as I could with my limited vocabulary, and they in turn insisted on buying me lunch. How about that?