Puno May 24 – 25

We got up bright and early in Copacabana on the Tuesday and got to our meeting point for a 630 departure. As was the case in Asia and also in most of South America nothing leaves on time and as such I think the bus finally left for the border at around 730am. We got there at 8am to find out that the immigration office was closed and some guy was feeding us some bulls**t and made everyone pay one boliviano for a piece of paper. We couldn’t be bothered with the hassle for the sake of a few pence so handed it over to the dodgy entrepreneur. Due to the immigration office being closed the officials had set up a table by the lake and stamped our passports there! Once again some lady wanted two bolivianos for this so called service, but we literally had nothing left at this point and everyone was forced to club our pennies together!

We had been told that our boat would leave at 8am, but of course we were left sitting next to cows by the lake until around 1030am. The boat was slightly better than expected with bus type seats but still very small for a nine hour crossing! Not much we could do about that though. I slept on and off for the first few hours of the journey to stop me feeling sea sick, but this meant that the last four hours felt like they went on forever. Puno was eventually in sight but it still took another couple of hours to reach it after sunset.

Upon disembarking in Puno we were told that the immigration office was closed and there were no buses to Arequipa, meaning that we were forced to stay in Puno for a night. We were aware that there were protests going on so wanted to stay in town for as shorter time as possible. The four of us headed towards the city centre and bumped into a guy that owned a half decent looking hostel. He told us that the immigration office was infact open and escorted us there. This meant walking through the protests who kept shouting ‘tourista’ at us and then we were took into the back door of immigration to get our stamps to prove we were in the country legally. Back through the protests we went to our hostel for the evening, before quickly grabbing some chicken and heading to bed.

Puno itself doesn’t have a great deal to do, it is on Lake Titicaca but nowhere near as pretty as Copacabana and as is the case with most Spanish cities there are lots of churches! Not that we really got to see much!

During the night 15,000 protesters arrived in the city and marched throughout the night passing our hostel on numerous occasions. We got up early once again to try and escape the city, but the bus station was on shut down and a holiday had been declared for all so that businesses could close up and avoid any problems from the protests. It was not even possible to get a taxi out of the city as protesters had set up blockades for miles all around. We went to the tourist police to find out our options, but there were none and they escorted us to an ATM and back to the hostel as they didn’t want us to be seen with our backpacks. The lady at our hostel had told a group of ten of us that she would be able to arrange for us to walk a short distance and get picked up by a minibus for our escape. We had to wait until 2pm to find out if this was definite though so we wasted several hours on facebook and playing cards.

2pm came and the minibus still wasn’t definite but a guy in our hostel just so happened to go out in the street and bump into the Army General. His house was 50m away and he was helping his family escape, having spoken to several local people they had all expressed their sorrow about what tourists were having to do to get out of Puno, it seemed that most of the protesters were actually from other cities. As a gesture of goodwill and wanting to help us out the Army general arranged for a big army truck to get us to the next big town, Juliaca, where we could catch onward buses. We couldn’t quite believe our luck but waited outside the General’s house (where a butler in a gold waistcoat and bow tie appeared) and thankfully the truck appeared.

All of a sudden around a dozen more people arrived and we all began piling into this army truck along with the luggage. We sat in the wrong place and were surrounded by backpacks, suitcases and I even ended up with a 60 year old Argentine man straddled over me! To add to this a camera man and news reporter from an American Peruvian channel appeared and decided to film us all and interview those that could speak Spanish. We personally found the experience all a bit surreal and kind of funny, definitely a good story to tell, but were so happy to be getting out of the city.

Unfortunately due to the time we lost we had to miss out on Arequipa and the Colca Canyon which was gutting, but out of our control. Upon leaving the city we could see how bad the road blocks were and we knew it would have been extremely difficult to get out on a minibus. There were hundreds of locals walking the long distances on the roads as they couldn’t get their transport in or out of the city.

It took about 90 minutes to get to Juliaca in the cramped but amusing conditions, and on arrival we booked a night bus to Cusco as soon as possible. The lady from our hostel had rudely taken up someones space in the truck to try and make a quick buck from us all, but the four of us escaped as we didn’t want her to make commission for doing nothing for us! The rest of the group foolishly paid extra and she made some decent money from them. As we refused to give her any commission she tried to say we hadn’t paid for the hostel, which of course we had. We went and had some dinner and upon returning bumped into her again, this time she tried to say we owed her money for the internet which was foolish because we have laptops and used the free wifi! She eventually realised we weren’t handing over any money and backed away. You meet many people like that over here and so many tourists seem to hand money over when they received nothing for it! We met people at the bus station that had even bribed police officers to get them out of the city, yet had rocks thrown at the cars, so it seems like we made the best and safest escape possible.

Our bus finally left Juliaca around 730pm for a 6.5 hour journey to Cusco. This is a very short distance when backpacking but the bus was terrible, seats were broken, gears were grinding and the driver was just crazy! Thankfully we made it to Cusco in one piece with a great story to tell!