Crossing the Border

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Crossing over to Bolivia was a little more challenging then the other boarder crossing. When we were getting on our bus the bus driver noticed that we were Americans and was not happy. Apparently Americans always have problems and they take three times as long. As you can imagine Eric and I were a little nervous. When we got to the boarder crossing the bus driver was rushing us out of the bus because we were Americans. Our first problem was with getting out of Peru. We didn’t have our departure ticket so we asked the police man what to do and all he said was that we couldn’t leave the country. After a few minutes of sweating he finally told us we could buy one with a small fee attached of course. We left Peru, walked over to Bolivia and started the visa process. It all went very smoothly but just took a little more time then the rest of the people on the bus. Unfortunately there was another American on the bus and didn’t know the visa requirements for getting into Bolivia. He did not have the sufficient amount of funds and had to leave his passport while he went and found more money. We had to wait on the bus for him for over 20 minutes, no wonder the bus driver was not happy to have Americans on the bus.
We arrived in Copacabana and found that everything here was very inexpensive. The hostel that we were staying at was $2.50 a night. The second day we took a tour of Isla de Sol. During our tour we hiked through the whole island. This took us about three hours and most of it was up hill. We were very tired by the time we got back to Copacabana. We found the city to be a very nice town, perfect for our first stop in Bolivia. Now off to La Paz.

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