Coming down from the highlands into a low-lying city, we really felt a difference in the climate and scenery. The air was more tropical and very warm, and cruising in the taxi from the airport to the hostel, we saw how modern Santa Cruz was. The roads were huge with many lanes and everything seemed so westernised! We reached the hostel pretty late that night, so we crashed out and waited for the morning to bring some new hope for our volunteering. Once we arose from our slumber and checked out the city, we quickly realised what a boring and horrible place Santa Cruz was. It was a city trying to match up to the US, with wide roads, big cars, advertising billboards, long distances and generally not much to do. Somehow we ended up staying there for a fairly long time, despite the fact that it was a place we had no desire to stay so long in!!!!The six days or so that we were there, were spent chilling out in the hostel, eating lunch and dinner a few times in the Irish pub on the main square, walking around the few crazy markets that sold everything, watching tons of DVDs in the hostel common room, and just hanging out with the staff, whom we made good friends with. Marisha had her blood tests done one morning and by the afternoon had the results (Private Bolivian health care - cheap and efficient!!), which thankfully came back clear. We continued looking for projects to work on, but quickly realised that all the ones in Santa Cruz were very religious, and we were not prepared to enter an establishment where they were instilling faith as the main objective of the project. Hence, we decided to wait and try our luck in Peru, where all our internet browsing told us there were many other opportunities for us to volunteer. Although we were angry at not being able to help in Bolivia, and angry at being left hanging, it wasn't all bad and we are happy to have met some great people, who helped us to pass our time in Santa Cruz, since there wasn't actually anything to SEE. We spent a lot of time with Ricardo from Brazil (our token gay friend!), Yandira ( a Boliviana working at the hostel), Alessandro (a crazy half Mexican half Italiano, with all the traits of a typical Italian), Seth (an Iranian Jew from the US), and all of Yandira's many friends who were so warm and welcoming. You may see from the photos, the size of a pizza we ordered one night with a load of people from the hostel. It was MASSIVE, and to top it all off, it wasn`t even the largest on the menu!We even managed to squeeze in a crazy night out with everyone from the hostel. We arrived on the main street with all the bars one night and being the only people in the bar, we took over the music, the bar staff and the dance floor! In dribs and drabs, more and more of Yandira's mates joined us and it ended up being a great night of amazing cocktails and tons of dancing! At the end of a very frustrating week, we took a long bus which was to take us to the city of Salta in northern Argentina. This ended up being the icing on the cake of a pointless week in Santa Cruz, as crossing the border here is something we NEVER want to do EVER again! We boarded our bus at night and the journey was meant to take around 17 hours. When we arrived at the border crossing, we stopped at a bus station, and that's where things started to go wrong. We seemed to be the only two tourists on the bus and everyone else was Bolivian or Argentinian. Everyone got off the bus and when we stepped off, random men began hounding us and we couldn't understand what they were saying.Eventually, we followed one along with some other people, to a little ticket kiosk, where we handed over our passports for them to check the passengers on the bus.This was a little unnerving as we hadn't been told that this was part of the procedure, and as a traveller, your most valuable possession is your passport! We then waited around for 20 minutes in the freezing night air, without any clue as to what was going on. We repeatedly asked the man at the kiosk and he kept saying we had to wait, but we still had no idea what for! Then, an army of taxis arrived and we were bundled into one with our bags and a German couple with a Bolivian baby (!??!). In the hurried mass movement, Rakhee realised in the taxi that her passport was missing, so we had to turn back to see if she had dropped it in the street outside the kiosk. When we got there, the man said that he had found it and sent it on to the border with another taxi man. Panicking and stressed, we made the taxi hurry back to the border, where LUCKILY someone was waiting with the passport! We walked along a stretch of dirt road until we reached a hut, which was apparently the place to get our exit stamp for Bolivia. We continued along the dirt road and over a bridge until we reached ahuge building, which was apparently the entry point into Argentina. We waited outside for a while, wondering why none of the guards were letting us into the building. Finally, after 20 minutes of lingering, they told us to form a queue. There were over a hundred people outside the building wanting to cross the border, some from our bus, some from other buses, some locals, some school children, and some who just looked like theives! The sun was starting to come up by this point and the whole process so far had taken at least 2 hours! The guards finally came out and took passports of the 20 people in front of us. They told these people to move to the other side and wait. This took another hour or so. FINALLY, our passports were taken in groups of ten. Then we had to wait for another hour for them to pass them back to us and let us into the building so that we could cross over. The sun was fully up at this point and our patience was starting to wear thin. We were starving and tired, and having had the smallest amount of sleep on the bus, pretty frustrated and grouchy too. Once in the building, we were told that our bags had to be searched. We were sooooo angry by this point, as all our belongings were turned out, opened and unsealed. The officials didn't leave a single pocket or plastic bag unchecked, and then right in the middle of it all, they stopped and turned to face the door.We were really confused at this point, and after asking what the hell was going on, we were informed that we had to wait while they raised the Argentine flag outside.At this point we both burst out laughing, because the whole thing just seemed so ridiculous!!Eventually we were allowed to repack our bags and after another half an hour went by, we stepped out into the sunshine in Argentina, where we still had no clue what was going on. A man from our bus agency told us we had to get a taxi to the bus terminal, where we had to apparently get on a new bus, and then change once more after that before we would reach Salta, our destination. Not amused, we bundled ourselves into a taxi once more with the same people as before, and waited rather impatiently at the terminal. The bus arrived 15 minutes later than planned (surprise surprise!) and we lugged ourselves onto it, ready to sleep the rest of the way. Fat chance of that, as twenty minutes later, we had to get off the bus again for a random check! We had to take our bags off too and show our passports to some officers, who decided that it would be fun to re-open our bags and check out all our belongings, AGAIN.The first officer took Marisha's passport off into a hut for 20 minutes, before returning and making a THOROUGH search of her entire backpack.He opened up absolutely everything, including some tampons, because he didn't know what they were.Slightly bemused, she tried to explain in broken Spanish what they were for, but found it less funny when he proceeded to open up the sealed packets and then try to put them back in her bag!As if she could use them after he'd put his dirty hands all over everything!The bench onto which everything was being unloaded was FILTHY, which only served to irritate her more as we had both just had laundry done before leaving Bolivia!!He asked her millions of questions about where she was from, who she was travelling with, and what her plans in Argentina were, before finally allowing her to repack her bag and move on.In a really bad mood, she repacked and took three steps, before being stopped by another officer, who demanded to see her passport.By this point, at least five different officials had seen it and she couldn't see what the big fuss was.The official asked her if she was Gambian, because she had a Gambian stamp in her passport from her visit there just before Christmas.Having had enough and thinking that this man was utterly stupid, Marisha corrected him and pointed out that he was holding a British Passport, which stated quite clearly that her place of birth was London!!!Another official came over as he could see that she was getting irrate and by this point she was almost yelling!!!He explained that two days before an Englishman and a Spaniard had been caught with a large stash of drugs on them whilst crossing the border , and that had been the reason for all of the checks we had endured thus far. Whilst it didn't make it any more bearable, it at least explained why we were being checked and the Bolivians and Argentines on our bus were being allowed to pass through relatively unchecked.During all of this, Rakhee tried to slip through without being noticed, however an officer saw her go without her bag being checked and decided to take action. The officer shoved her into a room with another female officer, who decided to meticulously search her bag for 'drugs', 'weapons', and 'other illegal things'. This took forty minutes as the stupid woman spilt a glass of water on the bag whilst she was unpacking everything, and trying to find drugs or anything at all to pin on Rakhee. When she was certain that Rakhee wasn't a drug smuggler, she started a body search and even checked her throat. Rakhee was NOT amused and emerged from the interrogation room as angry and frustrated as ever. The whole bus let out a slight cheer as she boarded and we were finally allowed to continue our epic journey, but on at least two more occasions we had to get off the bus for random checks!We soldiered on, despite being in bad need of sleep, and after a while, wondered why we hadn't reached the point where we were to change buses.We asked a conductor, who told us that we had just passed the station where we needed to get off!!Since we had been bugging him all journey and specifically asked him to inform us when we got to the station in the first place, our bad mood progressed into an awful mood.The driver let us off at the side of the road with our bags, and we had to drag them in the dirt almost 500 m back to the bus station we had just passed, a place called Jujuy. There, a rather rude woman from the bus company bought us tickets on the next bus bound for Salta, which necessitated a further hour long wait. By this point, we were both fed up, tired, dirty, and annoyed, but there was nothing we could do but wait.When the bus finally arrived it was full and the conductor told us we would have to wait for the next bus!Since it was only an hour more to Salta, we pleaded with him to let us stand on the bus, since there was still space in the hold for our luggage, and non-plussed he agreed.We stood, aching, for one houralong the bumpy road to Salta, and not impressed, given that we had paid a lot of money for what we had been told was a DIRECT bus from Santa Cruz to Salta.Over a day after we had begun, we arrived in Salta absolutely exhausted...