Puno is the biggest town on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca. It is near a border crossing into Bolivia and is also surrounded by important mining areas. In the past, there have been various violent demonstrations against mining and other causes the local people decide to fight against.
We happened to be there at the start of a riot and they were fighting for all foreign mining companies to leave the area. They had blocked the border crossing as well as the roads leading up to it. This posed a problem for us, as La Paz was our next destination. With my birthday approaching, I was keen to stick to the schedule but this was not possible.
Luckily I had my favourite Peruvian bar in town to frequent in the meantime. On two of the nights, I chatted to a British RAF guy on holiday but who was normally stationed in the Falkland Islands (or Las Malvinas if you are Argentinean). As much as he didn’t like it there, I still would want to visit them sometime.
We stayed in Puno only one extra day and night before the office gave us the all clear to take a road around the north of the lake that many people had heard of but that nobody dared to venture. After an afternoon of running around the town, trying to get stamped out of Peru, and buying emergency supplies in case we got stuck on the side of a road, we left on the morning of my birthday and headed on what came to be known as ‘the Indiana Jones adventure’.
The first part of the journey was fine. A lot of the way was tarmac and the truck got her paperwork in order at the right office. After that in no man’s land, the thin dirt road winding up and down valleys meant that the truck was precariously close to toppling off a couple of cliffs.
We drove into the next town’s main square to see a Bolivian flag flying, after crossing the invisible border. There was supposed to be a migration office to get our official entry stamps. The police there informed us that there wasn’t such an office and that the nearest one was in La Paz. So we continued our journey. We arrived in the administrative capital late but with just enough time to get a good meal and have some drinks, to finish off my birthday as I had planned.
I loved La Paz as much as the first time I went there. The chaotic metropolis had something strange for me to see on every dirty street corner. Not much had changed in six years but I’m sure there are more people and there is even more traffic now. Travelling along the dirt roads (which actually had less rubbish along them than before), waking up to cold showers, and dealing with things not running properly, are things I enjoy when I’m away because of the neither good or bad differences from what I am used to. Many passengers disagreed and with most of them getting sick from eating too much street food, using the tap water to brush their teeth, or more likely, just having weak constitutions, they couldn’t wait to get into Argentina.
