A post that is nearly a long as it took me to get to Cuzco

The first I heard about the Lake Titicaca border crossing between Copacabana (Bolivia) and Puno (Peru) being blockaded by protestors was on my flight from Rurrenabaque to La Paz. One traveler was asking if anyone had any information and everyone´s response was ´The border is closed down?´ This was indicative of how easy it was to find information about the blockade. I learned that Peruvians protesting plans to mine a spiritual Incan mountain and dump the waste in Lake Titicaca had shut down 80km of the road between Copacabana & Puno, effectively closing down the land crossing. However, there were boats that were ferrying tourists between the two towns so there was no need to worry. A Peruvian from Puno I met in Sucre said he would keep me updated after telling me that he had walked 7 hours through protestors to get home. Even when I searched for news in Spanish over the next week & a half all I found were articles from when the protestors first shut down the road.

When I arrived in Copacabana the only signs of the protests were computer printed signs saying 'Boat to Puno tomorrow, 7:30am' taped over the placards usually advertising bus departures. The town was quiet, peaceful, and not full of stuck travelers. The first signs that things were shifting came when I returned from a night on nearby Isla de la Sol. A fellow traveler stopped me on the street and asked if I was trying to get to Peru. He and two friends (all Portlanders!) had been riding their bikes but now had a broken wheel and were trying to avoid the boats because (a) they were concerned about getting the bikes on (b) they were expensive and (c) they had heard stories of people paying to get on the boat and then being told there was no space for them and their backpacks. They had found a bus & driver who was willing to go to the Peruvian border via the other side of the lake, they just needed to get enough passengers to make it financially feasible. I figured, what the hell, I do want to get to Peru, these guys seem cool, sounds like the boats might not be reliable, and this could be an adventure. What followed was a nearly 3 day long adventure that involved lots of struggling with the way that Bolivians communicate, especially with tourists they are trying to earn money off of, which is to say not very well.

After hours of recruiting the planned bus departure fella through because two large groups and a couple of other people bailed at the last minute, leaving us with too few people to make the bus worth it. There was scrambling and a minibus was found that would fit the 12 of us remaining. We loaded all of our bags and three bikes on the top. Then the communication issues began. At first we had been told that it would take about 4 hours to get to Puerto Acosta, the town nearest the border. Now we were told that it would take 6 hours and that the driver would be leaving us there,  not driving us the extra to the border. When asked why he responded 'There is nothing there.' Our efforts to find out if there would be buses from Puerto Acosta that late at night (it was nearly 3pm) were not met with straight answers. For the next 15 minutes we went in circles, trying to find out how easy it would be to get from Puerto Acosta to Juliaca (the transport hub north of Puno in Peru) and why exactly the bus driver refused to drive us straight to the border. Eventually we realized that it was pretty late to leave and all of us were a little off guard by the lack of straight information. So all of our bags and the three bicycles that had been piled on top of the van were unloaded. One of the Portland boys decided to try and ride through the protests after meeting two French guys who were also riding (their ride turned out to be amazing, it was beautiful and the protestors were super nice). The other two Portland boys (Dylan and Gabe) had a broken bike wheel and were sick so they joined a girl from California (Yasmine) and I in finding a hostel and booking a boat for the next morning.

We were told to be ready to go at 6:30am. The owner of our hostel was sweet enough to hurriedly make us a breakfast that we scarfed down before hurrying to our meeting place, where we promptly waited for at least 45 minutes before loading the bus and then waited at least another 15 before leaving. It was ten a minute drive to the border. I think that the Bolivians made a mint off of the border closure. Firstly, the cost of a boat to Puno is much more than a bus would´ve cost. Secondly, after explaining to us all that even though we had bought our tickets from different agencies we were all traveling with his company the owner of Titicaca tours explained that he had, through his friendship with the Peruvian border, gotten a pack of the immigration slips we needed to enter Peru. For 1 Boliviano we could buy the slip and be more prepared than the other travelers at the border, which would be very good for us since we would be arriving at about 5:30 and the immigration office closed at 6. I turned to Gabe, said that was BS, the guy totally got them for free, we didn´t need them in advance and then because they were just 1 Boliviano, maybe 30 cents, we bought them anyway. This became something of a theme over the next 2 days. (Another theme of the coming days was the pain in the assness & difficulty of moving the 8 panniers that Gabe & Dyland had between the two of them since they had been instructed to take apart their bikes in order to get them on the bus and boat. After the entire ordeal Gabe professed his undying gratitude for the multiple times Yasmine and I lugged a pannier or two in addition to our own bags).

We arrived at the middle of no where spot near the border where there were three impossibly small looking boats waiting for the mass of us tourists and then we waited. And waited. I have no idea what we were really waiting for because after about 10 or 15 minutes of waiting two guys in border guard uniforms appeared and then a few minutes after that the table that would serve as the makeshift immigration office appeared and then a table where we could exchange money appeared. But still we waited. After about an hour one group of tourists finally got their exit stamps, but then they had to wait for their boat (they left after my group did). My group waited for another 15 minutes and then we were finally told to line up for our stamps. Then we discovered that we had to pay 2 Bolivianios for our stamp  (remember when I said the Bolvians were making a mint? There were probably at least 100 of us trying to get to Peru and the strike had been in effect for over 2 weeks). Begrudingly we paid our 2 Bolivianos and lined up to get on the boat. They would only let 4 or 5 people load at a time and they instructed the bikes to go on first. Then they wouldn´t let Gabe come back for the last of the panniers or let me join him in the loading. So I shoved  my way through the tourists in front of me, thankfully allowing Yasmine and I to get the last two comfy seats inside the boat cabin. It was 10:30 by the time we left. Granted all of this was an ad-hoc operation BUT they´d been doing it for more than 2 weeks and I gotta say there was a lot of confusion and a lot of waiting and a serious lack of information (please note previous statement about communication when dealing with tourists whose money you want) and I thought that after 2 weeks of doing this it should´ve been much much smoother. This was in great contrast to what we ended up experiencing in Peru.

A long, slow, dull 8 or 9 hour boat ride across Lake Titicaca was next. We thought that Puno would be quiet, that the protestors were just blocking the road part of the way between Copacabana and Puno. We thought that Yasmine and the boys would catch a night bus to Cusco while I was planning on staying in Puno for a few days. The Peruvian I had met earlier in my trip had invited me to stay with his family outside of Puno and I really wanted to see the famous floating islands. We were wrong.

We arrived in Puno in darkness (it gets dark at 6pm this time of year. totally hard to adjust to). In the madness of unloading one of the 8 panniers vanished. While the boys were looking for it I talked to the guards at the end of the dock about buses to Cusco. He told me we couldn't leave tonight, the protestors had blocked the road north of Puno to Juliaca. He laughed and I thought he was joking, then another guard told me wasn´t. Yasmine and I went ahead of the boys while they put together their bikes to see what we could figure out about a place to stay and getting out of Puno. But first, we had to get our Peruvian entry stamp in our passports.

We didn´t know that the protestors had made it to Puno but they had started filling up the town 4 days earlier. The first few minutes of our walk the streets were quiet, there was even a family playing volley ball in the street. Then there started to be people. Then things started getting busier and busier. There were more and more people. We came upon a plaza were trucks and cars were corralled together. The backs of the trucks had been turned into kitchens and everywhere people were eating and talking. There were banners and slogans written on the sides of the truck saying things like 'Aqua es vida'.  Everyone was kind to us as we wove our way through the masses, trying to work our way towards Plaza de Armas where we had been told we would find the immigration office. A few blocks from the plaza a man stepped out of a tourist agency and tried to convince to leave our bags in his office before continuing to the immigration office. Considering the loss of the pannier 10 minutes earlier we refused. He relented but insisted on accompanying us to the immigration office. The protestors had filled the plaza and it would not have been safe for us to walk through it. He took us around the plaza via side streets. I had thought that things looked crazy and packed until we got closer to the plaza and I heard the riotous chanting. The immigration office looked closed, you had to knock on the door to be let in. (Actually most of the businesses looked closed. If they were open they had the gates that they pull down when they are closed down with just a tiny door open that they could quickly shut when the protestors went by). Travelers poured in to get stamped and travel agency officials were offering different ways to get to Cuzco left & right. Yasmine & I were worried about the guys, hoping that they would also have a nice Peruvian befriend them and get them safely to the office, which, thankfully, is exactly what happened.

Miguel was our hero for the night. He had offered Yasmine & I hotel room earlier, but I told him we had to wait for our friends. He found and escorted Gabe & Dylan to immigration, waited for them to get stamped, then took all us to a hotel (which we got for a discounted price) after stoppping at an atm for us. Next he took us to a restaurant (we´d been eating cookies all day), found us a way to get to Cusco the next morning, came to the restaurant to tell us and then booked it for us. We all collapsed onto the comfy hotel beds for 5 hours of sleep before getting up to meet Miguel at 5 am.

The road to Juliaca closed the day we arrived in Puno and throughout the night the tour operators of Puno were coming up with alternatives to get travelers out of the city. Some people ended up on minibuses the night we arrived and the drivers bribed the protestors to get past the blockade. We were to take a boat across Lake Titicaca to where the roads weren´t closed, where minibuses would be waiting for us to drive us to Juliaca where we could catch buses to Cusco. At 5 am we headed out into the dawn lit, mostly empty streets and headed towards the dock. There were rocks, big rocks the size of mangos, littering the streets from protestors throwing them at cars and trucks trying to get through. As we headed down the ramp towards the dock another group of tourists were walking towards us, telling us to turn around. Protestors had heard about the plan to get us out and had blocked entrance to the dock. The Peruvians with us headed us a different direction, towards a different dock. We had made it less than a block from the dock when we heard the chants of protestors. A line of men, waving flags and running came down one of the streets from the city center. They were headed towards the dock we had just left but when they saw us there was a louder cry and they switched directions, running straight towards us. This was the only truly scary part of the trip.A rock was lobbed from across the street and shattered on the ground in front of us. Another rock was thrown that some how Gabe managed to catch. I held up my small backpack to protect my head. We tried to huddle together. A few more rocks were thrown. The Peruvians escorting us managed to placate the protestors by giving them money for breakfast, though not before one of our guides was pulled away when someone shouted that he was the one in charge of the gringos. After that they left us, our guides hurried us to the other dock where we quickly loaded up the boat before more protestors showed up. Some of us on the boat were headed to other parts of Peru and some were trying to get to Copacabana so our boat had to dock at the floating islands to wait for the boat headed to Copacabana catch up to us. So I did get to see the floating islands, even though it was only for a few minutes it totally made my day because they are completely awesome.

The rest of the day went smoothly. We chugged for a few hours across the lake, the mini buses were waiting for us and were quickly loaded. They stopped in a little town so we could all buy food and then drove us the hour to Juliaca. While on the boat one of the guides had come around and asked where we were going, selling tickets to our onward destinations. I knew he was overcharging for a ticket to Cusco, I told him that and he lowered the price a little. Even though I knew he was overcharging and I knew it wouldn´t be hard to find a bus on our own , he said it would be no problem to get the bikes on so we just bought our tickets from him, content to pay a little more to have things be easier.  When we got to Juliaca they dropped us off at the bus we would be taking (Not surprisingly not a tourist bus as the guy had told me it would be, but one they just put us tourists on first). It was missing most of its wheels because they were changing them. Nonetheless we loaded our bags, went and ate, returned to the bus (which seemed to almost leave us behind but in fact was going to get gas, ignoring the fact that we COULDN´T see it at the gas station and when it wasn´t where we left it would think it had left) and finally set off on the last leg to Cusco. It took another 7 or so hours, but we arrived in Cusco, got cabs to a hostel and group hugged in our room. It had been a long trip.

Even though the protests made my trip here long and even though the confrontation with the protestors on the way to the boat was scary I have to give a  huge kudos to the tour operators in Puno. They came up with a plan to get us out of Puno on the spot and it ran far more smoothly than our exit from Bolivia, which had been going on for more than 2 weeks. Though they certainly made money off of us they also were genuinely concerned for our safety and well being. They put themselves in danger and some of them had to walk through the protestors for hours to get back to Puno. Also, the vast majority of the protestors were peaceful and kind to us all. The ones that confronted us in the morning were drunk young men who had been up most of the night and were caught up in a riotous mood. We, apparently, got out in the nick of time. There was another boat from Puno at 9am (which we almost went on instead of the 5am one) and I overheard people in my hostel here in Cusco talk about it. They had much more intense confrontations with protestors, involving having to hide from them. The aquatic crossing from Bolivia is no longer open, we were the last or second to last day to get into Peru that way. I have friends who are having to return to La Paz and cross into Peru via Chile. I don´t know if this is true but I heard that the military intervened yesterday as well.

Cusco is beautiful. The weather is wonderful. Next stop is Macchu Picchu. I officially don´t have enough left to explore Peru before my flight home. The end.