Carnival capers

Back in La Paz, its 3am and we are standing on a street corner with the many drunken Bolivians that appear to be wandering the streets. We are waiting to be picked up by a bus heading to the town of Oruro for its carnival celebrations! Around 4am the bus finally shows up, it then crawls round town for another hour or so picking up locals before we actually get out of La Paz. 4 hours later we arrive at a police check point just outside of Oruro for a routine check, whoops Nathan has forgotten his passport! Shona being far too organized had hers though which soon vanished off the bus with an armed guard, promptly followed by us looking slightly confused but a little p'ed off. Lots of Spanglish (a Spanish / English hybrid language I'm getting quite good at!), a few raised voices and exaggerated arm gestures later we had Shona's passport back and we didn't even have to part with any money to get it – they wanted to keep her passport as a guarantee that she wouldn't cause any trouble (some people just look dodgy!) at the carnival! We got back on the bus to lots of strange looks but just smiled nicely and sat back down. Finally arrived at the carnival and grabbed some seats in the stands. It was already in full swing, 1000's of people danced and sung their way down the main road in an array of strange outfits from robots, witch-doctors and ewok-type things to traditional Bolivian dress (bizarrely including very short miniskirts), lots of gauchos (cowboys) and Cuban style suited bands. As good as the parade was, the crowd seemed more interested in having a foam and water balloon fight, so having located the local water balloon seller we soon joined in the fun. At one point it turned into a full blown war between our section of the crowd and those opposite, eventually spilling into the parade. After spending far too much money on foam and water balloons we headed back to La Paz arriving at around 11pm, tired, wet and sticky but we'd had a fantastic day, plus Shona managed not get to deported!