New year and visas

Captain's log: Stardate 09011.6

To get our new shiny volunteering visa we needed to first have a specific purpose visa, rather than our current tourist visa. So on the 27th December we headed to the bus station in Cochabamba in the evening. The way bus tickets are sold here is people go around shouting place names, and then you follow them to their stand where they tell you times, prices and coach type. After a bit of wandering around, we found a coach going to La Paz at 2130 and so booked tickets for that. They were £6 each for an 8 hour journey, with decent comfy seats, possibly the most comfy coach of the entire journey. That was then us until we arrived at 0500 in La Paz. We had booked a tourist coach to Cusco in Peru that picked you up from your hotel at around 7. Since we didn't have a hotel we had arranged to meet them at the Adventure Brew hostel not far from the bus terminal, at 0700. Luckily the staff let us in to sit somewhere warm and read for a couple of hours until the coach turned up, so that was good.

The coach turned up on time and we set off towards Peru. Around 4 hours later we arrived at lake Titicaca, and had to get out of the coach and take a motor boat across, whilst our coach was driven onto a wooden raft and floated over the narrow stretch of water.

After that there was another 45 minutes of driving and we had reach Copacabana. On the Bolivian side of the border to Peru. We had 6 hours there, and so we grabbed some food and walked down the sea front a bit. Near Copacabana there is the sun island and the moon island, which is where at least some Inkas believed that the sun and moon were born. So on the sea front we found these statues dedicated to them:

We had booked a boat trip to visit the sun island. Which was 1.5 hours each way, with a 1 hour walk in the middle. It started quite nice, hard work due to the altitude but pretty. Later on we reached the centre of the main town, which small as it was was rammed with tourists, and locals trying to sell you stuff. Eventually we found our way back to where the boat was and only just within the allotted one hour too.

With that it was off on buses again. We quickly reached the border, and left Bolivia and then entered Peru. Swapping to a different fancier although not all that comfy coach on the way. Two and a half hours later we had reached Puno, where we stopped for dinner, and then another 9 hours overnight until we arrived in Cusco. Finally there, we found our hostel and luckily got a bed within an hour or so, and slept until lunch.

Cusco is nice enough but again very touristy. We quickly got annoyed at being asked to view a menu or have a massage or have our boots shined etc... Although the ladies walking round with animals were quite cute. We had a picture with an Alpaca, who was just so fluffy! Unfortunately we turned down the lady with the baby goat. We didn't do a huge amount that first day as we were still pretty tired after two nights on coaches.

The next day we took a collectivo to Pisac, a town about an horu away that was meant to have some nice ruins to see. It was also pretty touristy but we soon left that behind as we decided to walk up the mountain to the ruins, rather than get a bus or a taxi up like everyone else. It was a long climb, but totally worth it. We saw no one else going up, and only a few people on their way down. Their was an awful lot of up involved in this, which we quickly began to realise was a theme for the rest of our trip.

We got a taxi down in the end because we were a bit hungry and wanted to go to one of the other sites covered under our entrance ticket.

So we got a taxi down and the driver dropped us at a local restaurant that had a sign outside saying: "Hoy menu familiar", which pretty much means, "the usual menu". It was pretty tasty though and really cheap as well. After that we got another collectivo to Urubamba and from there another on to Ollantaytambo.

So we started off climbing up the ruins there, yes more up. This was a much smaller site than Pisac, but the ruins were even more impressive. Also at the bottom we found a herd of the local majestic furry land slugs.

We stayed in town to have a snack and a few drinks before getting two more collectivos home. The next day we went out to a third site covered on our ticket: Chincero, where they had a weaving centre that Amy was interested in. They showed us how to turn a sheep into string, my science officer said Alchemy is a fools game, but they went and did it in front of our eyes anyway. Then they showed us how they make dyes out of natural ingredients such as insects, corn, rocks and two year old fermented baby urine.. Amy bought some sheep and is working on making string now. After this we climbed up (yes again) to more ruins, which were interesting but not as good as the others.

This was new years eve, so we headed back into town and got ready for the night. With a few beers in our pockets we headed to the main square Plaza de Amas, and arrived just before midnight. For about a solid twenty minutes there were fireworks everywhere. Turns out that Peru doesn't really have restrictions on fireworks, and so from every direction there were fireworks going off, some of which narrowly missed the crowd. It was packed full of people, and if you found any open space at all, it was because someone was about to explode something. We didn't stay too long, as it was kind of hectic, and we were both pretty tired.

On our final day we obtained some dollars that we would need on the border to buy our new visa, and recovered from everything. In the evening we got our bus, and arrived back in Puno the next morning at around 0500. We booked ourselves on an afternoon bus to La Paz and another boat trip to see the floating islands, then had some breakfast and went on a trek to find decent coffee.

The floating islands are artificial islands made by the Uros, the islands are made out of reeds. Using 3 meter blocks of roots to float the island, and then multiple layers of the stems to make a mat that you can walk on albeit springy. Their houses are made out of reads too, as are their boats. Their diet consists largely of reeds and fish. It was a really interesting tour and completely not what I expected.

Once we made it back to the border, our troubles began. We were told by two different border guards that we could not get a specific purpose visa on the border. Despite what our immigration lawyer had told us. So we had to enter on another tourist visa, luckily they gave us another 30 days in the country, which we can probably extend to 90 days as before. They told us to get the specific purpose visa you had to go back to Puno or to La Paz. We decided to stay in Copacabana which is roughly in the middle of the two, therefore abandoning our onward ticket to La Paz. However after about an hour of franticly checking every hostel and hotel that we could find, we decided that there was no space at all in Copacabana. Abandoning that plan as well, we found ourselves a bus to La Paz and took that. There was a traffic jam, so the 45 minute journey from Copacabana to the ferry crossing took actually about 3 hours. We made it across and found our bus again and slept most of the rest of the way to La Paz, arriving at almost 2 in the morning still without anywhere to stay. We went back to the Adventure Brew hostel where the staff let us check in even at that time, so that was great.

In the morning we managed to contact the organisation sorting out our visa stuff and they told us they'd get back to us by the next morning. So we spent the day in La Paz, which is quite a cool city, although it has quite a bit of up, and some dodgy wiring. For dinner we got the cable car up to El Alto, the satellite city on the mountain plain, the highest city in the world at 4,100m. We found a pizzeria after a bit of wandering and had the biggest pizza ever, all freshly made. Then took the cable car back down. Not a very interesting day, but we got to explore La Paz a little.

The next day we were told to meat the organisations Tramitadora (lawyer thing) at immigration in the afternoon. After talking to people in immigration we went to the Consulario where we talked to 3 different people all of who said something different. Finally after about two and a half hours we managed to work out that we did need a specific purpose visa, and you can get those in La Paz or Puno, but you need more documents than we had. Including a UK police record and proof of financial solvency. We figured we couldn't do any more in La Paz so got a final night bus home to Cochabamba.

So after almost 50 hours on buses we don't have the visa we wanted and are a bit tired and grumpy. We had a meeting with the organisation and found out we can get a police record from interpol without having to return to the UK (hopefully) and so that's good news. Unfortunately it takes a month and because of the way the visas are done, you have only a month to get the volunteer visa after you receive the no objections letter. So since we received that almost 3 weeks ago, we are going to run out of time before we can get the police record.

Luckily the organisation got back to us yesterday saying that the people who deal with the visa understand our situation and will still give it to us once we have got a specific purpose visa. So as long as they don't change their minds we should be OK.