Rygsækrejsen 2015-2016: From Bolivia to Peru

Today we said goodbye to Boliva and hello to Peru. Months ago when we first started to talk about Bolivia it probably wasn't the top country of the list, it was more a "travel through country" between Chile and Peru. Why - we don't really know. Maybe because we thought we had seen some of the nature Bolivia offers 5 years ago in Argentina and because we would see more of it in Chile before entering Bolivia. Furthermore when we got to Chile we heard a lot about drunken drivers on the guided tours especially in Southern Bolivia, unsafe bus tours because of the crazy bad roads and a lot about people having their things stolen in Bolivia.

What can we say?? We all have to make our own experiences. We loved Bolivia and spent 3 weeks there instead of the initially 2 weeks we thought we would stay.

We spent time in some truly unique nature - i.e when we visited Topoco and his llamas, when we flew from La Paz to Sucre and when we hiked around Sucre. We met nice and helpful people - Malene forgot her walking shoes in a taxi, luckily only in the small village of Rurrenabaque, and she managed to find a nice taxi driver who drove her around town asking all his taxi colleagues about the shoes, and they managed to find them. We enjoyed all the traditional colorful dresses and hats many off the Bolivianos still wear. We discovered that Bolivia is not only chaos and big cities like La Paz but also charming and quiet towns like Sucre. On top of all we spent some amazing days in Rurrenabaque in the Amazonas seeing heaps of animals, fantastic to see there's still a bit of nature and animals left in the world.

When that is said we also were influenced by other peoples experiences and recommendations. We decided not to go with the busses in Southern Bolivia and flew from Chile to Bolivia instead. We also flew from La Paz to Rurrenabaque instead of taking the bus. This gave us some interesting experiences with turbulence and small planes, where we for a short time wished we had taken the bus instead.....but only for a short time.

So saying goodbye to Bolivia this morning is perhaps more of a "see-you-later". We would like to come back an experience more of this beautiful and diverse country. The local bus left after a lot of filling in forms and having the bus driver going back and forth inside the bus asking us for passports and tickets. Then we drove 10 minutes to the Bolivian border stop, had a very angry man stamp our passports, walked 300 metres across the border to the Peruvian side and had a very nice man stamp our passports. And we were in Peru. The landscape, houses, people and everything else completely unchanged. Borders are a curious invention.

The drive to Puno took around 2½ hours from the border but crossing into Peru meant gaining an hour - which makes borders even more weird. At the bus station we bought tickets for our next leg - to Arequipe - having at least 20 different departures to choose from with departures leaving early in the morning to late in the evening. Then we found a tuk-tuk that took us to the town centre. Plaza de Armas always works. We found a cafe and booked a hostel and walked there with our stuff.

Puno has plenty of good cafes and since our hostel had a slightly different outdoor area than we expected - garden vs construction site - we found a place with a courtyard and good food and coffee for lunch. Then we spent part of the afternoon walking around town. We booked a trip for tomorrow to the island of Taquile and a visit to the floating Islands.

For dinner Mikkel had found a great place with vegetarian food - which turned out to close at 6 PM, way too early for our dinner. Instead we walked back through town and had the last table at a local place that served pizzas and soup. The pizzas were great - the tomato soup today was not instant but definitely from a can.