Bolivia? No-livia!
I hope ya’all are entertained with our challenges, as it’s much more interesting to laugh at our hardships, perhaps we will feel the same when we return. Our plan after Puno was to head into Bolivia, work our way down through Chile, up through Argentina and back through Bolivia to finish in Peru. The stars were not aligned for us this day.
We bought our tickets straight to La Paz and left at 2:30pm. About 3 hours later at the border, the bus driver asked who the Americans were and he announced that it woud be $100 US to enter the border. We were shocked. It was the first we had heard of such a thing, having lived in Peru since September and following the most recent Lonely Planet guidebook (which says there is NO entrance fee). We thought they were scamming us and got angry. We walked to the Bolivia side and talked to immigration, who told us if we didn’t pay the $200 total, we couldn’t enter the country. That amount of money is what we could spend in a month of living in Bolivia (more or less). A border that has NO ATM and we don’t travel with that much money in our pockets any way. Shock to anger to frustration to disappointment.
Our only option was to turn around, hop on a taxi to the next town, grab the last 2 seats in a local bus going back to Puno (facing sideways, against the driver’s seat). So around 9pm we got back to Puno, at square one. Apparently, this past December, Bolivia’s socialist president decided to charge a reciprocity fee to Americans. Thanks a lot, Georgie. But a nice thing DID happen to us, we visited the agency we bought our tickets from in Puno (ALL Ways Travel) and explained the situation and the very nice owner, Victor, reimbursed the portion of the bus we didn’t ride (border to La Paz). No one informed us of the entrance fee when we bought the ticket or got on the bus (they knew before we boarded the bus we were from the US)…maybe someone should have, we could have looked it up as well but didn’t think to. Well, Chile currently has no fees for entering on land (it’s $100US if you enter on a plane in Santiago) so we’ll head there next.