It's unusual for students in a school that is in Doha to come as far as Bolivia for a field trip, especially when a tropical country like India is just a hop across the ocean.
"Move faster, silly girl," yelled Basura Samarasinghe at Shifaly Udawatte, who struggled to carry her knapsack up to her seat. Weary of her slow movement, he rudely pushed her onto the seat. Then, he, along with his companions, walked up the aisle to the back seat of the bus.
Being angry, Shifaly got up from her seat, went to the back of the bus and cussed at Basura, demanding to know why he had pushed her.
That was when Mr. Chandrasene Seneviratne, without any judgment of the matter, yelled at Shifaly: "Silly girl, don't be an idiot, sit down."
"What? It was him…" she protested.
"Just shut up and sit down," he commanded in his thick, Singhalese accented English. Basura wagged his tongue at her.
Yelling a thousand curses under her breath, Shifaly went, fuming with hot anger, back to her seat. After all the students had boarded the bus, the female teacher Dayani Wickremasinghe emerged, as she climbed up the stairs and sat beside fuming, grumbling Shifaly on the front seats of the bus. It was raining outside. The sky was laden with thick, grey clouds.
After confirming that all students were present, Mr. Seneviratne told the hotel staff (who assisted the bus driver) that they could proceed to the hotel. The driver started the bus and drove out of El Alto International Airport's driveway.
Shifaly stared at the window, admiring Bolivia. She had never been there before. In fact, she had never gone out of Sri Lanka and Qatar. So, for her, it was fascinating being in a new country.
La Paz's airport is technically not in La Paz. It's in another city called El Alto, which borders La Paz in the east. So, the bus had to go on a highway from El Alto to La Paz before going to the hotel where the children will be staying, which was in La Paz.
Shifaly could relate to the thickness of the traffic on the roads. It was like Sri Lanka. There were a lot of vans, white silver and blue. Bikers tried to slither through the traffic on their motorbikes. It was risky riding a bike in that traffic, thought Shifaly. In Sri Lanka, where there's a similar amount of traffic, there are many accidents that happen daily where bikers die.
The bus passed through an underpass with murals painted on the walls. The paintings on the wall were of the style Picasso painted in. Some of the artwork was buried beneath a lot of political posters that were posted on the wall. The bus passed beneath a lot of pedestrian over bridges that seemed so old that Shifaly feared that they may collapse onto the heavy traffic below. On the pavements, vendors had set up carts. Some were boiling corn, while others were roasting peanuts. The bus passed by a big building with tinted windows. It must have been a mall. Shifaly could only read a billboard that read, 'Comidas.' A line of lush green trees separated the road they were going in from the path that was going back to the airport. To the annoyance of the bus driver, who let out a loud volley of honks when that happened, few people crossed the roads when there were no crosswalks. The bus driver cursed loudly. That day the Sri Lankan kids got their first introduction to the glossary of Spanish cuss words.
The bus passed by lawns laid out in a terrace-farming layout on both sides of the road. There were some flowers planted in those lawns. After a few minutes, the bus had passed through a line of toll booths and exited the urban areas. The sun's strength began to wane, signaling the advent of twilight. Once they crossed the toll booths, the entire landscape changed. To their left-hand side, there was a steep drop. There was a guard-rail on that road that protected every traveler from tipping off the edge. The children were astonished by the beautiful sight of the serene, glorious, astounding Andes mountains. Some of the mountains in that range were dotted by hamlets and settlements. The hills were towering; the Andes surpassed the beauty and glory of every mountain range that the children had seen earlier. The children bade goodbye to El Alto, which soon vanished out of the horizon. The bus traveled through a forest with tall trees on the right side, and a steep drop on the left. Every sight, smell, and sound of Bolivia intrigued Shifaly. Her eyes were glued to the window.
An hour later, the bus entered La Paz. Shifaly was taken aback by the colonial style of architecture of some buildings in La Paz. She glanced at the crowded streets and a few adobe houses that weren't painted, and smelt the smell of fumes from vehicles mixed with the aroma of good food cooked by the vendors on the streets. La Paz was more crowded than El Alto. By then, Shifaly had dozed off. She was tired because of the journey and the jetlag. Even though she had no problem, her classmates were experiencing altitude sickness.
At sunset, the bus had reached the parking lot of their hotel. After some sorting, Shifaly got her room. Shifaly had an entire room to herself. The one that she got was unusually large for a room that was to be inhabited by one person. She asked the concierge why was the place like that, and he told her that the last occupants of that room were four people, but since her school wanted one bedroom per person, the hotel staff removed the other beds and arranged the room in such a way that it could suit one.
Four hours had passed, and Shifaly was sleepily watching the last episode of Stranger Things. There were no tours organized for three days so that the students would be able to adjust their biological clocks to Bolivian time; for, the students had traveled a long way from Doha in Qatar, which was in a different timezone.
Shifaly thought that this time was an excellent opportunity to binge-watch on Netflix.
About many kilometers in an unknown direction, in the rainforest, the Wolfgang children just finished supper and readied themselves to sleep in their capsules. The whole day they did some hiking. That night they had some singing and dining before they retired to their capsule. They retired early, however, because it started raining.
Shifaly was woken up by something pelting on her window. She woke up and put the laptop, which was still on her lap, on the bed, and walked towards it. After moving the curtains aside, she smiled as she saw rain droplets on the glass. She opened the window and was taken aback by the beautiful smell of rain. Noticing that rain was pouring on the room's floor, she reluctantly shut the window.
Shifaly's necklace fell off the dressing table, while she reached for her makeup, and slid below the bed. She was struggling to find it. After an intensive search, she bent down and found it under the bed. She put her hand under the bed and pulled out her necklace from under the bed.
It was not just her necklace that came out as she pulled it out: a maroon booklet was dragged along.
At first, she thought of just taking her necklace and leaving the booklet under the bed. Then she wondered what harm was there in just glancing through the booklet's contents.
Then, curious Shifaly forgot about her necklace (she placed it somewhere on the floor randomly), and sat on the floor, examining the booklet she discovered underneath her bed.
The booklet had the dimensions of a passport.
When she brushed her fingers against the surface of the booklet's cover, she felt the same soothing feeling that one feels when they rub their fingers on the surface of their passports. She flipped the booklet and observed the front cover.
Engraved in gold on the booklet, she saw the words: An tAontas Eorpach. Below it, she saw similarly engraved words: European Union. Below these engravings, the word "Eire" was printed above an emblem that resembled a harp. She recognized that it was an Irish passport after her eyes came across the word "Ireland" above the symbol.
She opened the passport to find clues as to who the owner of the passport was.