Today we left the godforsaken place that is Puno.
We got up at a decent time and headed out of town because there wasn't even a restaurant near our hostel. We ended up finding a place for desayuno (breakfast in Spanish) just on the outskirts of town. There was a definite language barrier this time, but all we knew going into the meal is that she didn't have eggs, but she did have coffee. We ended up with a plate with fish with tons of bones and some rice or something. It was pretty terrible, but it somehow only cost us 7 Soles (about $2 Canadian) total for the two of us. Not too shabby...in fact I'd say it was well worth it for a meal with coffee for a dollar.
The road wasn't too incredibly exciting, but some nice views by the lake made it still pretty enjoyable. The one weird thing was the amount of vans we saw with sheep strapped to the rooftops (yeah....live sheep on the roof of vans). Kinda weird, right?
We got the the border and it was a typical gross border town that seemed dirty with nothing labelled. Great. In all actuality tho, it was pretty easy to leave Peru. The official was quick and efficient...the only wierd part was the amount of bicycles that had been converted to carry vegetables from Peru to Bolivia. There was a nonstop train of them that made it hard for even a motorbike to get thru. Quite strange.
Bolovia was pretty easy to enter too, just a bit of a line for immigration and a single photocopy at the Aduna for the bikes and we were done. While we were there, we met a tour guide guy that was super chill from a company called Tucan Tours. He was touring people all around South America and had been doing it for over 2 years so he had some good advice for us....including that fact we can barter over gas prices in Bolivia....but we'll get to that later. We also ran into the swiss lady again (the same one from Nicaragua and Panama and Columbia). Pretty crazy.
After an hour and a half or so at the border, we were on the road again. Our first mission was to find fuel as we'd already driven 200 kms on the Peru side before reaching the border. The only reason we didn't fill up before crossing was because we could only find 84 octane gas. Figured that might be a little low. There's gotta be a gas station on the Bolivia side that's better, right? Wrong....well kinda. The first gas station we went to said he didn't have any. The second was about 20kms farther and they said they weren't allowed to sell to us. Finally, the third gas station did finally allow us to purchase gas (after some convincing) at a price of 5 Bolivianos per liter. Sure, whatever. The real price on the pump was 3.74 Bolivianos, but we knew foreigners got a precial terrible price, but hadn't figure it out yet so we just went with it....especially after going 300kms on this tank and Dave was already well into his reserve.
It rained on us super hard as we were entering La Paz and Dave's bike was still running pretty terrible just from the elevation. I guess that's what happens when you travel to one of the highest cities in the world without changing carborater jets. We found a hostel down the road from the hostel with a brewery with parking for the bikes so we got in and went for food at a super greasy burger joint. That was probably around 4 or so.
We showered and all that good stuff, then went down to the Adventure Brew hostel where we endulged in some decent beer, played pool, ping pong, foosball, beer pong, and met some pretty cool people. Definitely coming back again tomorrow, but we called it an early night around 1030 so we could be good and fresh to ride the infamous Death Road tomorrow. So excited!
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