Advertisement
Although we have been on the road now for over five weeks this is our first blog entry. If we feel the inclination at some point we may do a wrap up of the first month of our trip, but not right now.
After an excellent couple of weeks touring central and southern Bolivia we eventually made our way to La Paz, the capital city of Bolivia. We had teamed up with a couple of British girls, Heidi and Kayleigh and headed to a hostel they had booked for us called Wild Rover, in the heart of La Paz. Upon arriving early in the morning we promptly discovered it was the worlds craziest party hostel and a few guys we had become mates with were not only staying there, one was working behind the bar! Needless to say we enjoyed many drinks but unfortunately the stay was tainted by the discovery that there were mass protests around the Bolivian Peruvian border and it was seemingly impossible to pass. Normally we wouldn't mind changing all our plans to accommodate something like this, but with a trek up to Machu Pichu booked for the near future we absolutely had to get to Peru.
It appears (from the limited knowledge available) that the Peruvian government has sold the rights to a gold seam discovered near the border to a Dutch company. Turns out that not only did the locals that discovered this seam want to buy the rights to mine (but had no money) but the plans the Dutch have hatched to mine it will contaminate local water supplies. Thus the locals have decided that the best way to display their unhappiness is to make what is probably the worlds funnest attempt at border closure. Their efforts consist of:
A) getting very, very drunk.
B) piling all manner of objects on the road to stop vehicles getting through. These objects include rocks, sticks with thorns on them, beer bottles (of the non returnable type) and chains inexpertly strung across the road.
C) drinking more
D) standing outside the immigration control office on the Peruvian side of the border with sticks and rocks and chasing away any foreigners that approach.
So basically there is now a 20 kilometer stretch of road that connects the Peruvian border with the next town along (Puno) that is now impassable. Should you manage to get a car through you will most likely be stopped, have your tyres slashed and rocks pelted at you and then have to walk the rest of the way.
While deciding whether or not to back up our night of drinking with another party we fortunately discovered thath a tour company had organized a bus and boat to skirt around the border. This involved taking a bus from La Paz up to the lakeside city of Copacabaña and from there obtaining some migrations stamps and jumping a boat to Puno, on the other side of the lake.
We dutifully got up at a ridiculous hour in the morning and got the bus to La Paz only to discover that "No hay un barco. Manaña solamente". With resigned sighs springing from the unreliable Bolivian tourism industry we hung out in Copacabaña for the evening.
Copacobaña itself is a reasonably pleasant lakeside town. Seemingly entirely dependent on tourism for survival it does sport a couple of ok nightspots and a lovely jetty to watch the sun go down over the lake while the boats come back in and moor for the night.
Come d-day we once again got up at 6ish and went downstairs to wait for an hour for our bus to arrive. They took us up to the border where the immigration office is, around 20 minutes out of town. We got our exit stamps but were told that on NO ACCOUNT were we to cross the border into Peru here, we would need to head to Puno as there were demonstrators waiting over the border. This was a little problematic as our boat was over on the Peruvian side. After a while we grabbed our bags and proceeded to sneak through the bushes down to the shore on the Bolivian side, nicely hidden by a ton of reeds. A few guys started rowing over the border to the boats on the other side but they spotted us and started to come over after a while. By the time they arrived there were close to 200 people fighting to get a boat and the local police had arrived and had to be bribed. Eventually we got a boat and headed off, officially we weRe nowhere in the world as we had been stamped out of Bolivia, but not into anywhere.
After a 9 hour boat ride across the beautiful lake titicaca we eventually arrived in Puno, eventually found an immigration office and eventually got our stamps. All in all a pretty exciting day.
We are now in Puno and will be here for a couple of days. I will do my best to keep subsequent posts a LOT shorter, Verity may need to write the next one.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.336s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 55; dbt: 0.049s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Daryl Kerrigan
non-member comment
At last!
For someone who is so good with interwebs you've sure taken you time hitting cyberspace with tales of your adventures. Not a bad first entry but I will reserve my judgment until I've seen some consistency. Daryl (possibly related to Milo)