Copa.... Copacabana. 3rd April.

1st to the 3rd of April.

My arm was just recovering from the belting Jo had given it for me saying Lake booby brrm brrm all the time. When she started belting me for singing the Copacabana song all the time. To be honest I was completely sick of it as well, but it got her all riled up every time, so in my opinion it was well worth it.

We were crossing into Bolivia on the next leg of our journey, and had heard all kinds of stories of corrupt officials and the like, so we were not taking any chances with our luggage. However the border crossing is a little different, well it was for me, we pulled up in the bus and had to get off. We walked up to the police post had our passports stamped for exiting Peru and then walked up the road 200m to the Bolivian side to get stamped into that country. Our bus was to drive on through and meet us on the other side. This was supposed to take 5 mins, there was a friendship parade going on between the Peruvians and the Bolivians, complete with soldiers on parade with weapons.

Guards on parade.

If we hadn't seen the smiles on their faces we would have thought they were going to fight. This meant that our bus took more like and hour, with our luggage ' safely' stored on the bus. It all worked out ok and all our bags were in fact safe. I did see the same shoe shine boy on both sides of the border, he must have thought my shoes would have gotten dirty walking through the border. I guess he must have duel citizenship or something, but I didn't see him get passport stamps. The border guards on both sides quizzed us quite a bit on kangaroo's before they let us through, maybe they thought our passport were fake or something.
After checking that there was actually ink in our passports, apparently it is a bit of a trick of the Bolivians so that they can hit you with an on the spot fine later in your travels, we bordered our bus and hit Copacabana.

View of Copa from on high looking sth and down at the town.

Apart from Cuzco this place was the best we'd seen so far. It is smaller than Puno but with a much nicer feel. For $10us we got the best room we had had so far on our trip, I didn't have a tape with me but it wasn't far off being bigger than our apartment in London. I secretly wished Jo had held off a day being sick so we could stay here, but these are the hardships you face while travelling I guess. Everything was cheaper, so we kind of splurged on the meals a bit, for what we payed for an average meal in Peru, we couldn't spend the equivalent on the most expensive thing around.

View from the same hill looking nth.

Jo was soon feeling much better, but not quite up to climbing the hill right on the edge of the lake. It is a 140m climb talking about half and hour each way.The views were absolutely fantastic, you could see right across the lake to Puno, more than 100km, they said it has something to do with the thin air. I could certainly vouch for the air being thin, I kept having flashbacks to the Inca Trail.
We hung around for that day, organised a next day bus to La Paz and retired to our room thinking ' I hope the rest of Bolivia is this laid back '