Finally I left Arequipa… feeling sad and attached to that lovely city… Lacking the discipline, I was not able to start the journey early, and was only able to board the bus for Puno at 12.30 pm. The bus was supposed to be direct, but it turned out that the bus was unusually slow, picking up some passengers along the way. Peruanos were annoyed, tapped with their feet and angrily yelled “Vamos!!!” at every stop. By the time I arrived to Puno, around 7 pm, it was already too late to go to the border… it was closed. Not bad…. Because I was in the town that I already knew and was comfortable at and it was not a bad place to spend the night!
After the night in Puno, I finally was on the way back to Bolivia, to Copacabana. I decided to go with the tourist bus, so that to avoid the hassle of taking 3 different buses. This bus would wait for every passenger to go through the customs and drive us safely to Copacabana. Hmmm… Here is the story…
I got in trouble with the Peruvians… I overstayed in Peru by 3 days. I was really not aware that my entry stamp to Peru was for 30 days only. In the future, I will have to be more careful and count my days of permanence in each country. Well, I had to pay a fine of $3, which is $1 for each day, which is more than ok…. It was my fault! However, there was an additional….. $30…for some secret processing fee….. that I had to pay. It was obviously some sort of scam. I disagreed and was trying to get some scoop on what were my options. Apparently, after a while I learned that there was another option; I could take a taxi to the village where the bank is and pay my $3 fine directly there. 15 minutes later I was back on the border and had to be taken to a special office, re-processed, photocopies taken, etc… Finally, after saving $30, I ran to the Bolivian immigration, got my stamp…. And realized that my bus with my backpack was gone….. I got Panicky!!! More so pissed at the bus company… That was the whole deal that the tourist bus would wait for everyone to go through the border!! Alone… left on the border… no backpack… I was about to cry… I was so angry… My Spanish all of a sudden had disappeared and I sounded like a poor lost gringa… I was told to take another bus to Copacabana and go to the office of my bus company to see if the backpack was there at least. I was about to get into the other bus, when someone called me to tell me that my tourist bus came back. It turned out that the tourist bus took all of the tourists to Copacabana and came back empty to reunite me with my backpack. The driver refused to drive me to the city, I yelled at him, told him his company was “mierda”… (I really need to learn some more Spanish bad words) :) and had to take another bus to the city, that was luckily only 15 minutes away. At this point, I will try to let go of the trauma and disappointment and continue to enjoy my travels…
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