We took a bus from Puno to Copacabana – it’s only about 5 hours, including the border crossing.
This was our most annoying border crossing yet (keep in mind that by this point – May 1 – we had crossed borders 14 times!), mainly because (I think) of the Bolivian attitude towards tourists. You see, Bolivians don’t like tourists or travelers – at all:
- They don’t want you to take pictures
- They don’t have a solid transportation infrastructure
- They generally don’t seem to like foreigners
So here’s how a Bolivian border crossing works: You go to cross the border, and pay your $135 visa fee for Americans (this I actually agree with because the U.S. requires the same fee of Bolivianos. Thank goodness they don’t adjust it for the relative cost of living!). Then you find out that you need the following:
- Photocopies of your passport (which we didn’t have extras for)
- Passport-sized photos (which we did have)
- Photocopies of the form that they make you fill out at the border (which we didn’t have)
Of course, there are some Bolivianos who park themselves outside of the immigration office with photocopiers and digital cameras, so they’ll charge you a nice sum for these. The thing that we discovered is that everything in Bolivia seems to cost more than what people tell you. There are always extra fees (we like to say that everything in Bolivia costs 20 Bolivianos more than you’re quoted). It’s really less of a “Welcome”, and more of a “So, now you’re here!”. So, we paid our way through the Bolivian entry, and continued on to Copacabana.
We really enjoyed Copacabana – we happened to arrive there on Bolivian Labor Day, so there was a huge celebration going on in the town. There was a special site up on a hill where we were able to watch every group come in and perform:
We also walked around the town while we were there, and found some cool things:
The next day, we took an all-day boat trip out to Isla del Sol, about 2 hours away, where we hiked from the north of the island to the south, checking out some of the Inca ruins along the way. We also saw some of the locals on the docks and in their sailboats. See what we saw here:
Finally, we spent half a day getting ready to leave Copacabana. You see, the strike that delayed us arriving in Bolivia kept going, and meant that only some buses were going to La Paz. And, our bus had to take a pretty extreme route on the way to La Paz – we were completely off-road (not just off of paved roads) for an hour of the 4-hour trip:
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| From Copacabana – Around |
So then we went to La Paz…
