Escping Peru...

While in Peru, miners and locals were striking against a proposed mine near the boarder of Bolivia and Lake Titicaca.  This was a problem because the road they were blocking was the closest and main crossing point between the two countries.  We heard that it was still possible to cross by boat, so we left Cusco for the Peruvian lakeside town of Puno.

When we got there, sure enough, we heard the road was still blocked and it was only possible to get to Bolivia by crossing the lake in a boat.  We thought that we might as well see the famous floating islands nearby and go to one of the nearby islands and stay the night with a local family.  We hoped that the strike might possibly be over when we got back.  That way we could take the much quicker and cheaper bus option.  We had a great time on our little overnight tour as you can see in the other post.

However, when we pulled up to the dock the next morning, we realized the strike problem wasn't getting better, but worse.  Much worse.  There were police officers with machine guns waiting for us and warning us to be very careful.  It turns out the thousands of strikers moved into town and took over.  It didn't look good.  No cars were on the roads and broken glass, bricks and stones were scattered around in the middle of the streets. 

As we made our way carefully back to our hotel, we saw a large group of protesters within two blocks of our place.  All of a sudden a man ran out of the crowd.  A few others chased after him throwing rocks.  We guessed it'd be a good idea to walk quickly away and make a large loop to approach the hotel from the opposite side.  We made it.

It was really time to leave.  So we decided to buy our boat ticket as soon as things mellowed out some outside.  Little did we know, we had to get our passports stamped to buy the ticket and to do this we had to pass through the parading strikers.  But there was no choice.

To make a long story a little shorter, we got our ticket and were on the boat first thing in the morning.  It was an extremely slow boat that took about nine hours.  The bus ride would have been maybe an hour.  The port on the Bolivian side was also closed, so we were met by a fleet of local rowboats that took us and our luggage to shore.  Then everybody walked about a mile across farms to get to an immigration office.  And finally we took a local taxi-bus to our destination of Copacabana.

I have to add that our bus crashed into a car when we left Copacabana.  AND we ran into another strike just outside of the next town where we were supposed to catch the train.  Luckily we were early enough that we still caught our train after walking a mile and talking the driver of a six-person van taxi into taking twelve of us to the train station.

Bolivia....adventure land.

 Stopped for another strike.

 The road was blocked by public employee vans.