Bus travel in South America

A Cruz Del Sur bus (from their site)

We felt we should add a post purely about bus travel in South America and share some of our experiences. Generally it is very safe and the companies are great. This goes for all countries except Bolivia, where many companies are dodgy (generally) and the buses are not of a very good standard. We had a theory that Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile sell their old buses to Bolivia when they are run down and looking pretty tired.

In Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile the buses are like being in business class on a flight. They have Semi-Cama (almost flat seats, with a leg-rest) and Cama (fully –reclining beds, totally horizontal – amazing).

We had great buses in Brazil, we also used a couple of private transfer companies (listed in the links on the left), but also used Catarinense & 1001. Both fine.

In Argentina we used a small company (sorry can't remember their name) where our bus was severely delayed but the company bought a ticket with an affiliated company for us and we were fine. It was lucky we spoke some Spanish as all announcements of the cancellation (a bloke walking along the platform, shouting) were in Spanish.

Peru was probably the best for buses in the countries we went to. We mostly used Cruz del Sur. They are more expensive but very good, efficient and great staff (apart from the surly woman we came across in Paracus). There is a watch out in Puno; we did some research and found the best company to book from Puno to Lima was a company called TourPeru, so we went to their ticket office at the bus terminal in Puno and booked 2 tickets for the next day, they told us their system was down and issued us a receipt for the tickets and asked us to come back the next morning an hour before our bus and collect the tickets – basically the bloke who sold us the tickets was moonlighting for another company and gave us tickets for this other, cheaper bus company (to be fair it was to the correct destination). It was all very dodgy and we were not impressed with the company he put us on. So always check this.

Bolivia was by far the worst country for buses. As a rule they do not have functioning toilets and even on 10-12 hour journeys they do not stop for the toilet. We saw men peeing in plastic bottles and dirty nappies being thrown out the window. Pretty much the only thing missing from Bolivian buses was livestock. We learnt to dehydrate ourselves for several hours (longer on longer journeys) so we did not need the toilet.  

In Bolivia you can only purchase bus tickets on the day of travel, not in advance like you can in Peru, Chile, Argentina and Brazil. None of the buses we travelled on in Bolivia were clean or comfortable, but if you are prepared for this you will be fine.

Chile is like Peru with regards to it’s buses. They are very efficient and clean and comfortable. We used  Tur-Bus and Pullman, both were great.

Full Cama

Semi Cama

  

Boliva: Lagoons, Salt Flats, Volcanos and more

Cactus Rose

We booked a 4 day 'Salt Flats Tour' with La Torre Tours. Afder doing substantial research on Trip Advisor and other travel sites and reading blogs we decided that the tours are much better from Tupiza than Uyuni. In Uyuni they have very inconsistent reviews, which is mainly down to the fact there are so many tour companies there and most of the drivers and cooks are 'freelance' so someone who is a questionable driver can work for several companies. In Tupiza there are only a handful of companies and La Torre Tours are the best from what we can tell.

Lots of Land Cruisers, and a Nissan

Our tour started at 8am and we were shown to our Land Cruiser and introduced to our driver, Mario, and our cook, Isabella. Both very lovely and cheery people. We handed our stuff to Mario who was standing on top of the truck loading our gear and provisions for the trip. We also met the other couple on our tour, Sue and Tom from Switzerland. It was just the 4 of us on the tour, there is a maximum of 5 people on a La Torre Tour (from Uyuni they pack 6 people + the driver and cook in the jeep!) and we took turns in sitting in the small child seats in the back of the Land Cruiser.

Very cold at the lagoon

Day 1 is mostly driving to get us to the first nights' hotel, we start by passing the spectacular vertical red rock formations just outside Tupiza and then travel along winding dirt roads past some pretty amazing scenery(we will run out of superlatives in in this blog). We stopped for lunch at a small mining town where we had arrived on the day of the village school's 7th anniversary and they were having a presentation. It was quite sweet as the whole town (of less than a thousand) were out in the main square to celebrate the day. The food was great, Isabella had pre-made some chicken schnitzels and we had salad and potatoes to go with it.

We drove on through the Anawanapampa desert and Mario noticed one of the back tires had a small leak so we stopped on the road (dirt track) and he changed the tire (our second flat tire in 3 months, not bad considering all the miles we have covered!) we drove on and stopped in an abandoned town which the locals call a 'Ghost Town' it is where an army of Spanish lived after the invasion when they made the Inca's work the mines, at times not letting the Inca's out of the actual mine caves for months at a time, and they had to keep everything in there with them including the livestock! After a stop at our highest point of 4,855m we stayed overnight in San Antonio de Lipez at 4,200m in a hostel (no showers), all the acommodation on this tour is very basic and all 4 of us are in one room, with Isabella and Mario in another (even more basic than ours), there are toilets but as we said, no showers, not until the 3rd night when you can pay 10 Boliviano for a shower, well this is the desert and water is precious (and 10 Boliviano is less than a Pound!). Mario repaired the hole in the tire with the help of our torches - and removed the tire from the wheel by driving the jeep over the wheel and freeing the tube from inside, luckily Mario is a mechanic.

Day 2 began with an early start. Breakfast and we headed to the Lagoons, along the road we had to drive through several frozen streams which was quite amazing to see in the desert, it does get very cold in the desert at night. The first lagoon was our first glimpse of Flamingos, they were just eating around the edges of the lagoon, some of it was still frozen and they were sliding along the surface. A little longer along the road we stopped at a lagoon we thought was covered in salt, this was in fact borax, which is used in the manufacture of ceramics.

Any guesses?

About an hour later and we were at the gorgeous Laguna Verde (green lagoon). We stopped for photos before heading to the Aguas Termales just down the road, we all put our swimmers on and jumped in the springs, though very warm in the water outside it was blowing a gale and the wind was pushing the desert sand against us which meant we came out of the baths dirtier than when we went in, but as we keep saying 'it's an adventure!' After the springs we went to see the geisers, they were spewing hot gasses into the air - very cool to see. Next stop was at the red lagoon, this is where we saw hundreds of Flamingos. At our next hostel it was even more basic than the previous and colder too, so we used our rented sleeping bags which we really only needed because the beds looked like the sheets had not been changed, there were hairs and other bits in there. So we decided to sleep in the sleeping bags with the blankets over the top. We went outside before bed into the freezing night to see the stars, unfortunately the moon was very bright and this affected the ability to see all the stars, but being away from city lights and pollution it was still magnificent to see what we could.

Ah no, she's stuck

The first stop on day 3 is at the rock tree, it is a rock which has the form of a tree sticking out of the desert, there are other rocks around and it is quite something to see. Tom climbed on top of a few of them, while we took photos of him and stayed relatively close to the ground.
We then headed off to the next lagoon where we saw a fox, it seemed quite used to people, tourists probably feed it. Here we saw many more Flamingos, these were curiously more tame than the ones at the other lagoons. We were able to get within 2 meters of them and take some shots, it was extremely windy here and we had to really work hard to walk against the wind.

Viscacha

We stopped for lunch near some rocks, where we saw Viscachas (desert rabbit like animal) which were more than happy to see us as they eat all the crumbs left by the tours, probably not very good for them as you do not see carrots growing in the desert.
We stopped along the road to view the two volcanos Licancabur and Zaparelli before stopping in a town for Mario to have a break after hours of driving in the desert, he told us that this section is very tiring for the drivers and they are not sure why this particular section is so bad.

That night we had nice hot showers at the hotel which was made of salt. The floor was rock salt (you have to wear shoes or it is very uncomfortable) and the walls are all salt, even the pillars for the beds are salt.

Cactus Island

Up the next morning for the final day, we woke up 4.30 to see the sunset on the salt lake. It was magnificent and watching our shadows shorten as the sun rose was quite fun. We then drove to the Isla Incahuasi, which is covered in Cactus plants, it is at the heart of the desert, quite amazing to see. Here we climbed the island (it is like a small mountain) and then had breakfast where Isabella had made us a cake!

one of the 'Crazy photos'

It was then time for us to go to a section of the salt flats where we could take our crazy pictures. We spent 2 hours taking shots, some terrible, some quite good. Annoyingly our camera has some fluff and crap inside the lens so now all our shots have these spots. Will have to invest in photoshop when we get to Australia to clean our images. After our final lunch just on the shores of the flats, we arrived in Uyuni and went to see the train graveyard - Uyuni used to be the centre of all trains in Bolivia but then a new government changed the hub to another city and the trains were just left to rust.

This is where we said goodbye to Mario, Isabella, Sue and Tom and we organised our 2 day transfer across the border to San Pedro de Atacama while they all headed back to Tupiza.
It really was a brilliant trip, and having Sue and Tom with us was great - and not just because Sue can speak fluent Spanish and helped us out with the bits we could not understand.

Pretending we're Gaucho's in Tupiza

Us on horses. Not a sneeze in sight.

After yet another eventful bus journey in Bolivia, this time a toilet episode. After 4 hours driving the bus pulls into Potosi bus depot, where the driver picks up more people (more people than there are seats, so several people are standing, and will do for the next 6 hours) and taking this opportunity of a stop Ellen and some girls from the back of the bus get up to go to the toilet but are told to get back on the bus by the driver and that we will be stopping 'up there' (whilst pointing to the top of the mountain). Over an hour later the driver pulls up alongside a restaurant in a very small village and announces for us to get off for food and the toilet. All 40-odd of us on the bus pile into the restaurant and ask for the toilet, there is not one. Nice. So the driver shrugs and all of us scatter around the outside of the restaurant to find somewhere to pee - most of us go into the 'garden' (well, this is the desert) of the house next door and pee.
After this there was another 6 hours to Tupiza and the driver did not stop again. Luckily we have learned to dehydrate ourselves before Bolivian bus journeys and just to sip small amounts of water.
We arrived at about 6pm into Tupiza, with no map we had no idea how far the hotel was from the bus station so we just caught a taxi to the hotel (80 pence) and as soon as we got there we booked our 4 day Salt Flats tour, ending in a transfer to Chile (San Pedro de Atacama). Still within our daily budget.

We also booked a horse riding tour for the next day. Ellen has been wanting to go horse riding for a while and had read that Tupiza is one of the best places to do it. After all this is the area where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid allegedly met their ends.

Add soundtrack here.

Angel actually quite likes horse riding but is unfortunately allergic to horses, so there is a bit of preparation needed, mostly vaseline up the nostrils and antihistamines (also not being able to wear the clothes he has on on the horse again until they are washed).

We had to walk to the outskirts of town (took about 10 minutes from the centre, small town) with our 'guide' - he gave us the horses and then we followed him for 3 hours. He did point out the 'devils gate' though. We had great horses, they looked really well looked after, which was our concern, and were well behaved. Ellen even got hers to canter. She didn't know what this was but this horse did it. 

The ride was 3 hours, it was about 40 degrees by about 10am and we felt sorry for the horses having to carry us to the canyon and back. It was great to just relax and let the horse do the work and look at the scenery. It really is a beautiful place, yellowy dirt with red boulders and mountains jutting out from the ground with a brilliant blue sky. Really something to see. 

Dear reader, you will be happy to hear that Angel had absolutely no allergic reaction to the horse, either the antihistamine worked or he's not allergic anymore. 

Cochabamba to Sucre

Cochabamba's main square

We stayed in Cochabamba longer than we expected for two reasons, one was we both got quite ill and wanted to stay close to a toilet, and the other was the buses were not as regular as we expected. Oh and one more reason, because Ellen is rubbish at map reading.
Cochabamba itself is a very quiet place, not a lot happening, it's not really on the tourist trail but we went there after Ellen planned our route and mistook the dot on the map for Totora as the one for Cochabamba, 231 km away. So Cochabamba was supposed to be a stop to break up a 14 hour bus journey, but it added 8 hours. Not to worry, it was a great place to chill out and Skype family and friends and catch up on the blog. Also as there is not a lot to do we didn't feel guilty for not getting out and seeing a lot of sights, as there were not many. There is a statue of Christ on a hill which you can walk to (with, according to guidebooks, a high likelihood of getting mugged) or take the cable car. After discovering there would be no toilet at the top we decided against it.

Dumbos? Why not!

Instead we did a bit of a walk, staying close to clean-looking cafes and restaurants, just in case. 

We walked through the town market, down Espana street, we ate in a place called Dumbos - an American style diner (if you squint and turn your head sideways) which sold burgers, salads and ice cream. Angel must have been ill, he didn't want any ice cream. For those readers who don't know him, this is heard of. 

On Saturday morning we headed to the bus station to buy our bus tickets for that night to Sucre. In Bolivia you cannot purchase bus tickets on any other day except the day the bus is leaving. So we bought tickets at about 9.15 am and the 8pm bus to Sucre was already full, so we got on the 8.15pm one with Trans Copacabana.

Sucre

The ride started out quite well for a Bolivian bus company, left on time, then about 45 minutes into the journey the driver pulled the huge bus over to the side of the road, and walked into a dive of a cafe and had his dinner. No announcements, no warning. Some passengers got off the bus and followed  him into the cafe and others got off and relieved themselves in the bushes (there was no toilet, and as this is Bolivia, there is no toilet on the bus either). This was the only intentional stop in the 10 hour journey. Seriously. Lucky for us we had planned for this, done our research into Bolivian bus travel and had stopped drinking 6 hours prior so we were suitably dehydrated for the journey, knowing that Bolivian buses, though they usually have a toilet on the bus, they lock them and rarely stop for passengers to go to the loo.

At 1.32 am the bus stopped on the edge of a mountain road and after about 20 minutes of the drivers walking around outside the bus, we were all told we had to get off the bus and walk as the 'road' (read: dirt path) was muddy and we needed to lighten the bus to get it around the corner.  All the passengers got off in the pitch darkness and thick fog and proceeded to walk down the steep road (the drivers had given no indication of how far we were to walk). Luckily Angel always carries a small torch for such occasions in his backpack so we could at least wee where we were going as there was no light. We walked as far as we thought we needed to walk, and then after about 10 minutes of standing about and the bus came down the hill to pick us up, some old ladies had kept on walking down the hill and we picked them up about 200m down the mountain. Despite this little adventure we were not late into Sucre. In fact we were a little early. A first for our bus trips in South America!

Sucre market. look at her face!

We arrived in Sucre at 6.30 and shared a taxi to our hotel with a Kiwi girl who we had met on the bus, she was travelling alone. Arriving at our hostel was a little odd. We rang the buzzer, a guy answered speaking only Spanish saying we would have to wait an hour until reception opened,  but that we could wait in the courtyard, and then proceeded to stay on the intercom and not open the door. Still on the intercom a couple of minutes later, still talking to us and still not buzzing us through. Finally the door opened. Maybe he was still asleep. 

Dino Park, Ellen with Nessie.

The hostel (Kultur Berlin) is good, clean, very quiet, has German-themed cafe with great German apple cake (though appalling coffee!) and intermittent wifi (we are writing this from a cafe around the corner). Hot showers though, always a bonus! Also on the final day they came and told us we had overpaid by 640 Boliviano (about £64) and gave us our money back. which made it 50% cheaper than we budgeted for. Hostelworld had the wrong price. Nice!

Dinosaur footprints in the wall, look carefully.

In our first 2 days in Sucre, we went to the local markets then up to the Ricoleta neighbourhood and had a tour of the Franciscan monastery (the tour was only in Spanish and we impressed ourselves with how much we knew!) and then rode the 'Dinobus' out out to the very touristy site of the dinosaur footprints discovered in a quarry just on the outskirts of town. It was interesting to see the prints, but it was all very over-the-top - with very colourful life-size statues of dinosaurs and the 'imagined' dinosaur sounds piped around the park. Our guide was great though and even asked Ellen at the end if there was anything he could do to make his information better. Bless.

On our return to the hostel we discovered there was a general transport strike in Potosi, which was the town our bus to Tupiza needs to pass through, there will be road blocks and therefore no traffic can pass through Potosi for 48 hours, so we found ourselves stuck in Sucre for 2 more days, we had booked a hotel in Tupiza and they said they will move our booking to the 7th, and the bus company, we went back to the bus station to get our money back and they said we had to come back again tomorrow at 8am and get our money back. We were pretty sure it was a con and we would not get the money back in the end. Bearing in mind the tickets are 160 Boliviano for 2 (£15.80) and the taxi to the station is costing us 20 Boliviano return, and as we have been out there twice and would need one more time to go back, and at 8am, we decided to write-off the loss, and drank German beer at the hostel bar instead. 

I need to buy one of these!

As our room at the hostel was like a small apartment we spent most of the next day lounging around the patio outside the room in the hammock. Nice. We ate dinner at a great vegetarian place we had spotted just around the corner from the main square, very tasty, brilliant spicy salsa. 

The next day we planned the morning, dropped off laundry (rare that we are somewhere long enough to do it this regularly) and headed to the Simon Boliviar park, expecting it to be a large city park, but it was just a green nature strip with a road on either side, about 50m wide. It was pretty enough but also as Sucre is quite small it only took us 20 minutes to stroll here from our hotel. So we headed back into town to eat at the El Patio saltinas restaurant again and picked us up some of their amazing saltinas and empanadas and carried them with us as we walked to the city cemetery. It reminded us of the beautiful one in Buenos Aires in Palmero. Most graves it seems are placed in concrete vaults stacked high like bunk beds, this is because it is cheaper than family plots, some are 6 or 7 stories high. 

After eating our saltinas back at the hostel (we didn't eat them in the cemetery, that would be weird) we headed to what is now our local cafe, Metro, and had £1.50 frappachinos and skyped Ellen's Mum. 

El Patio's Saltinas

We finished off the day with dinner at a very interesting place called 'Nouvelle Cuisine' the name could not be further from the food. It's a really down-and-dirty steak house (in both senses of the word), bursting with locals and brilliant steak! The tables are covered in plastic table-cloths, the glasses were not very clean, so we drank the beer from the bottle, but it was certainly a great experience, the salad was a buffet and our steak came out undercooked but they were great when we asked them to cook it longer. It was a bargain too - we had a sirloin each,  all-you-can-eat salad, a big plate of chips and a litre of beer each, all for £12 (for both of us). Brilliant. Very full, we staggered back up the hill to the hostel where we had a couple of £1.50 mojitos. Bolivias very low prices have been keeping us well within budget, in fact we are struggling to spend our daily budget - including giving money to people sitting on the street. On our 2nd day in Sucre we were walking back to the hostel after the DinoTour and saw an old lady sitting on the pavement, she was not begging but looked like she was taking charity (we find many regional down-on-their-luck Bolivians do not beg, they sit there and wait for someone to give them money) so we gave her 30 Boliviano (just under £3) and her face lit up, she started singing and thanking us, there is so much poverty in South America and for us in London £3 would barely get us a take away coffee bit 30 Boliviano would feed this lady 3-4 solid meals from the town market. It made us feel good that we made her so happy, but there is the other side of the coin that in a couple of days she will be hungry again and relying on the charity of others.

We had a great time in Sucre, quite a chilled out couple of days, taking advantage of the strike and having an opportunity to relax on this hectic adventure without actually being ill! 

Tomorrow we have a bus to Tupiza. 10 hours through the desert on a cheapie bus (ie no reclining seats and probably includes livestock!) 

The Mighty Amazon

Very very small plane

Going to the Amazon was something we really wanted to do and Ellen did some research and found that is was cheaper and far less touristy to do it from Bolivia.

We booked with Chatalan, this is a company which is highly reputable and not one of the cheapies. 

We got up at 3am to get out 6.20am flight from La Paz to Rurrenabaque which was in a really small plane. Angel was unfortunately terrified, it was the smallest plane he has ever been on and it was a very bumpy ride with several drops! 

The flight was only 30 minutes and we were met at the Airport (read: shack) by the manager of the Chatalan Rurrenabaque office. 10 minutes later we were in the office and getting a debrief on our trip.

We met our personal guide Nilo, there was one other group of Mexicans who had their own guide. Nilo  would take us up the river to the Chatalan site and take us out for walks and canoe trips to see the jungle. 

The journey to Chatalan

The Chatalan site is 5 hours up the river from Rurrenabaque, we stopped for a snack after about 2 hours and the arrive
d at Chatalan for lunch. The river was magnificent, we saw loads of birds (mostly vultures) along the way and. Some spectacular scenery.

Our cabin was simple, we opted for a twin room as it was about US$100 cheaper, and it had its own bathroom and electricity from 6pm - 10pm. Each bed had a mosquito net. There were no blinds or curtains or glass windows, just fly screen. No one could see in as each cabin is within a secluded section of the site. The room was perfect for sleeping, in fact Ellen has had her best nights sleep of the whole trip here! The rooms are so dark as with the lights off there is no light source, no city, no cars, just jungle. Pitch black.

Birds on the lake

Our first day Nilo took us out in a canoe (another bonus of your own guide - he did all the rowing) around the lodges lake, it's quite large, it took us about an hour and a half to get around it, slowly, we saw loads more birds and some monkeys, our first Toucan in the wild, and a couple of fish jumping out of the water. It's just so peaceful (especially away from the drunk Mexicans) 

We ate our beautifully prepared dinner and went off to bed, as it's dark there is not a lot to do, it's early  mornings and early bedtimes in the jungle. That night it started raining at about 1am, now this is proper Sydney rain, not London drizzle. It poured down in buckets for about 15 hours and when it finally stilled at about 4pm the next day we could venture out and see the carnage; the pathways to the cabins were ankle-deep in water, the lake had risen so high the canoe pier could not be seen, and when we did venture out for a walking trip we took a canoe to the other side of the lake and walked up a path as we knew that would be clearer, but there were still streams of water pouring down the hill. We walked up to a viewing platform they had made and stood watching the birds, mostly macaws, enjoying the respite from the rain. 

Howler Monkeys

The following day we woke to the sound of howler monkeys, which sounded Very eerie, Angel thought it was the plumbing!  Today we decided to do one of the paths which were along the flatter areas, hoping the water had subsided. It had, a bit. After slipping and sliding through mud and rocks we arrived at the first river crossing, though the bridge had been washed away, so Nilo walked us a bit further downstream where he found a tree which had fallen yesterday over the river, and we balanced ourselves and walked over it. Along this walk we encountered several more bridges whcih had washed away, unfortunately not every river gave us a fallen tree and Nilo had to make us bridges out of whatever he could find, it certainly was an adventure. We saw loads of wild pigs, more macaws, howler monkeys, frogs, a Toucan, and even a woodpecker, which looked exactly like Woody!

Most bridges had washed away.

Dinner was a local dish of trout with rice and vegetables followed by the Chatalan team band playing for us and we all danced, after we had tried 'puma milk' ( a milky alcohol dink) and chewed coco leaves.  Later that night Nilo and Angel went out in the canoe on the lake, it was pitch black, with only the reflections of the stars on the lake and our torches as light we went looking for caimans. Unfortunately we only saw one with its eyes reflecting red with the torchlight, but the most magnificent thing to see were the stars. Just breathtaking. 

Our final day we woke to the sound of a Toucan, we've learnt their call and easily spotted one, then two in the trees high above our cabin. We had breakfast and began the 3.5 hour boat journey back to Rurrenabaque (it's faster on the way back as you have the river flow with you), had lunch in the town and arrived at the airport to find, to Angel's relief, that there was a much larger plane for the journey back!

Beautiful scenery

Angels's note on the jungle and your clothes:

Unfortunately it rained a bit on the boat on the way to the lodge and although the guides wrap your bags in tarpaulins, my bag got a bit wet, which is fine, but in the jungle nothing dries. Nothing. It's so humid and you are sweating that the clothes you have on get damp, when you take them off they don't dry unless you put them in direct sunlight. Needless to say we had wet clothes, shoes and towels. Lesson learnt. 

La Paz, a little disappointing.

To be honest we were quite disappointed with La Paz. We had been expecting a vibrant city with friendly people, but we found it was not and only stayed as long as we had to;  2 nights before our jungle adventure and one night afterwards. We even changed hotels on our return from the jungle as the beds in the first hotel Hotel Berlina, were just awful (broken metal coil jutting out of the mattress and ripped Ellen's leg, the hotel did not seem particularly surprised) But it did have an amazing rooftop view. We moved to Hotel Rosario and it was brilliant, great room (in fact the room we were in was the main image on their website) and great breakfast, and nice helpful staff.

Llama foetus anyone?

Arriving into La Paz is probably the most amazing thing about the city, you drive down hill into a spectacular valley of terracotta buildings. Its a sight to see and quite breathtaking.

After arriving into La Paz by bus (which was another adventure) from Puno via Copacabana, we did give the city a chance and set out to walk around the streets taking in the sounds and sights of this enormous metropolis. Starting at the Mercado de Hechiceria (witches market) filled with herbal remedies and, disturbingly, llama foetuses (apparently it is good luck to bury one under your porch, we passed), then we went to the Museo San Francisco, which was a bit disappointing really as they did not tell us when we purchased the tickets that half of the building had been closed off - and this included the section with the brilliant views our guidebook wrote of! Not to be too disappointed we headed up to the beautiful pigeon-filled Plaza Murillo, watching the kids feed and chase the pigeons which reminded us of Trafalgar Square in London, before feeding the pigeons was illegal, and then wandered the streets around this central area, then headed back over nearer our hotel to the mercado negro, a never-ending labyrinth of streets filled with stores selling everything and anything, here we picked up a few things we needed for our jungle adventure, including long-sleeved t-shirts. 

We ate twice at a great pizza place on Llampu street called Martinnis, we both got stomach bugs on our last day in La Paz so plain pizza was what we craved and so that is why we went back. Very friendly staff and great pizza's. We also ate at Kalakitas, a Mexican place which felt like we were eating in someone's living room, the food was nice but the overall experience was a little odd, but fun.

Puno to La Paz. An epic bus journey.

With Angel sick with one of the several bugs we got in South America, we decided just to head straight to La Paz without stopping in Copacabana as we were also running out of days and had not read any great reasons to actually stay in Copacabana.

Here's where the adventure started. Ellen had read about Tour Peru, a reputable company to take you from Puno to La Paz, as many, many companies here are more than dodgy - some are down-right dangerous.
We get to the bus station the day before we want to leave to buy our bus tickets. We get to the booth of Tour Peru and there is no one there. About 15 minutes later a bloke turns up at the booth in a Tur Peru shirt, we book 2 tickets for the 8.15 bus to La Paz, via Copacabana (there is no other way). We are told the ticket machine is not working and he gave us vouchers for the bus, and said be there at 7am to change our vouchers for tickets for the bus. Happily we walked away knowing we had been given vouchers for tickets before and everything worked out well.

7am the following day we arrived at the station, went to the booth to collect our tickets and waited for the bus. We were standing around and got chatting to a lady who was also on the 8.15 to La Paz and after a few moments the bloke who sold us the tickets came up to us and told us we were on the 'other 8.15 bus', we thought there must have been a large number of reservations so they were putting 2 busses on. No. this was not the case, we had been sold, by the Tur Peru bloke, tickets on a competitors bus which was leaving at the same time. We were annoyed as we had carefully researched the bus companies knowing they were dodgy, but we were also relieved as Angel was so ill that we were still getting to La Paz today. We got on the bus and found our seats. It wasn't too bad and we settled into the journey.

Peru-Boliva border

At the border of Peru and Bolivia you have to get out of the bus, take your passport to the police station, get a stamp on the card you got when you entered Peru, then take these to the border guards, who take the paper and stamp your passport, then you walk up the hill across the border crossing ant then go into the Bolivian border guard office and get an entry stamp, and another piece of paper you need to keep with your passport. Then you get back on the bus (which has come through with no passengers) and you need to pay about 40 pence in Boliviano to a man who comes on the bus and gives you a ticket. This whole process takes about 40 mins.

What the bus travels on!

After this we got to Copacabana without any problems (well, nothing but a but of puking from Angel), when we booked the trip we were told there would be a 30 min stop in Copacabana, so we were a little annoyed to hear there was a 2 hour stop before the bus would continue again, and that we would be put on another bus. 2 hours later we headed back to the bus company's office to find a small coach, and that a tour of Australians had been allowed to leave their bags on the bus and reserve all the good seats, so crammed up the back of the very hot bus with no air conditioning we left Copacabana and headed to La Paz.

About half way through the 3.5 hour journey the bus stops, no one tells you this is going to happen but you are asked to get off the bus while the bus is put on a ferry, and you have to queue up at a ticket booth to pay (about 20p) to catch a small motorised boat across choppy water to the other side where you wait for the bus to arrive by it's small punt and you get back on and continue your journey.
The crossing is quite an adventure.

La Paz Traffic

You get back on the bus and then about 2 hours later, after being stuck in an epic confusing traffic jam on the entry road to La Paz you reach the top of the hill down into La Paz. This view is amazing. You then descend into the city. Luckily Angel noticed our hotel as we passed it and when the bus stopped for the Australian tour to get off at their hotel which was just around the corner. Bonus.