We couldn´t exactly see President Kirchner through the mass of banners and flags above the crowd, but we knew we were less than 100 meters from the spot where she stood speaking to the tens of thousands of Argentinians around us. We strained to hear some of what she was saying, occasionally clapping along with everyone else when we did, but mostly we just marveled at the number of people in and around the plaza, the children and grandmothers and unions and bands and parties bleeding out of every adjoining street, beating drums and chanting or listening intently or drinking beer or making their way through the crowd, holding hands, like us.

But that is not a beginning. How did we get there and with whom? Perhaps this is better: Our last bus ride in Bolivia, a brief and brutal trip from Tupiza to the border town of Villazon, the bus opening itself, as always, to a crush of sturdy coca-chewing old women with bowler hats, impossible loads folded into vibrantly colored, dust-covered blankets, children sleeping on the floor or standing between their parents’ legs, men with sacks of bread the size of my backpack, small dogs and the occasional llama. The windows refused my advances and we weren’t sure whether it was a good thing, whether the smells and the dearth of air inside were preferable to the dust outside. I asked the man in the aisle cradling his toddler son if he wanted our seats and couldn’t make out his response. He had soft eyes and fingernails and a manner of crouching that bespoke the kind of labor I might know as an interval and he will know for a lifetime or more. I wondered what manner of distances separated us. We smiled at his son and he smiled back.

But Bolivia is a country about which I’ve written nothing. I haven’t described here crossing the border from Peru and spending a week in La Paz. I haven’t mentioned the gringo coke bars or the club owner with all the plastic surgery or the graffiti in the streets or how stunning it is to look down from above a city that is so vast you feel like it must be a diorama, a miniature. I met my friend Marissa there and walked the streets for days, eating at an Israeli restaurant and talking to shopkeepers about Evo Morales. Then I changed direction again and crossed back into Peru.

(A moment of linearity: I went from Cuzco and Machu Picchu to La Paz, but then I decided I needed to go back to Peru, so I pushed and pulled myself back through the grueling bus trips and the shuffling and stumbling at the border to land in Arequipa, back with Samantha, Cornelia and Annika for a few days. And then it was La Paz all over again, this time with Annika, after Sam and Cornelia headed north for Ecuador.)

The last bus ride was not the worst, but I suppose there are several contenders. Just before I ate the bread and cheese from the bus station on the way to Tarija, I had been thinking about just how well my stomach has fared in South America, how I was likely to go home without the kinds of problems I had early in my trip. Three hours later I was convulsing violently on an 18 hour ride in a (literally) freezing bus with no bathroom. Annika kept trying to give me another jacket, since I didn’t have nearly enough clothing, especially since my only pair of long underwear disappeared in a lavanderia, but I knew that if I moved I would be sick. When I couldn’t bear the cold any longer that’s exactly what happened.

But that bus trip nearly didn´t happen; after hiking in Sorrata, in the mountains north of La Paz, we were trapped in the city for an extra 30 hours because all of the major roads in the country were blockaded by protesters. Three or four days later, on another icy bus ride–for which I was again unprepared–we stopped by the side of the dirt road at four in the morning a few meters ahead of another blockade. Annika and I left the bus and walked to the road block, where we found mostly old women sitting around small fires in the brutal cold, their faces and dress and determination directly out of a traveler’s fantastical ideas about the ¨authentic¨ Bolivia. We wanted to sit with them, to ask them about their protest, to feel the fire and smell the smoke of their pipes. We stood there for a few minutes, shivering, and climbed back into the bus where it wasn’t much warmer. By six the teenage conductor told all of us–four backpackers and a bus full of locals–to get out of the bus. We asked how we would get to town and he said, in Spanish of course, ¨with luck.¨ We walked two kilometers in the cold as the sun started to appear; then some men in a pick-up stopped and told us to climb in the back. They dropped us at a hostel where two hours later rocks broke our windows as we slept–the protesters marching in the street did not want to see any businesses open during the general strike. The only problem that posed for us was that at first no one would sell us food. Every business in town was boarded shut and padlocked, but eventually, after a few hours of something like mild desperation, we found a few tiny tiendas that would let us in when we knocked, so we managed to feed ourselves.