Above: Our bus follows us on a barge across Lake Titicaca while we cross on a boat.
Our hosts kindly offered us an earlier breakfast at 0615; they have a maid so it wasn’t like they had to do it themselves. We taxied to the bus station arriving at 0700 for our 0730 departure.
All were aboard but we didn’t pull away till 0800. Perhaps they allow some extra time to check passports and documents. It took more than 2 hours to get to the border, where we were stamped out of Peru very easily; we were in front of the bus so didn’t have a queue. It was a short walk to the Bolivian checkpoint.
While I was prepared to pay for Bolivian visa at USD95, I wasn’t prepared for having to hand over hard copies of my hotel and flight tickets. As these are normally just sighted, I only had soft copies. I had to log into an internet cafe to have them printed out, and also make a copy of my passport. I had passport photos so that wasn’t a problem. I don’t think they even looked at the hard copies of the travel arrangements in terms of dates and names. They stapled it together and issued the visa once the fee was paid.
US citizens were worse off with a much higher fee of USD160. Also, they strictly check for Peruvian exit stamp before letting one into Bolivia and this has to be in the same passport (in case of people with dual nationality).
Despite the slightly stressful extra steps to print stuff out, I didn’t hold anyone up because I had been in the front of the queue. People who have to pay for a proper visa get pushed to a separate queue as well. Having said that, we did meet a US guy who got left behind by his bus as he was taking too long.
We felt chuffed that we had managed this crossing by ourselves. A couple of small groups of friends/family had guides with them to help with the crossing; I noticed at least two guides on the bus attending to their guests.
All-in-all, we spent about 1.5h at both crossings. We arrived at Copacabana about 15 mins later at 1300 Bolivian (1200 Peru) where we changed to less luxurious bus. The driver was unloading the luggage and everyone (yes, young strong backpackers) stood around not helping to lower the bags to ground level. Approaching half a century, I rolled up my sleeves to help out until my bag was eventually unloaded very close to the end.
As our bus pulled away for La Paz at 1300, I saw the large timetable by the office say that ETA was 1700. That’s rather late compared to the 1530 that was indicated to us at the time of purchase.
About 30 mins later, we pulled up into a town where the bus was loaded onto a barge to cross a narrow stretch of water. We were herded into a small motorised boat with no life jackets which did the crossing a lot faster.
The scenery from here on was quite beautiful with views of Lake Titicaca, hills and snowy peaks. We eventually went inland and around 1630 came to a standstill on the city edge due to a strike or blockade. We had been warned about this by a ticket seller that tried to put us on the 0600 bus from Puno using another border crossing. We thought it was just a ploy for a higher commission. Just as we were about to say “Damn!”, we met a German girl who had woken up early for the 0600 bus who found that it was cancelled; she was put on our bus.
After about an hour waiting, our driver finally decided took take a detour along a dirt track. We descended from El Alto (airport is 4,061 m / 13,325 ft) down a toll road into La Paz ((3,650 m / 11,975 ft) and got to the station around 1830.
Kim had reacted in bad way with a throbbing headache and nausea. It might have been the additional altitude while stuck at El Alto combined with reading on the bus. We both did without a sit-down dinner, making do with a delicious pork sandwich and empanadas in our room.
Waylaid by protestors on the edge of La Paz / El Alto.