Journey from Peru to Bolivia

From Puno you can take a bus that will take you directly over the boarder to Copacabana in Bolivia. There are a number of buses that do this route and they all leave at the same time - 7:30am. This means that at the boarder crossing you are waiting in line with people from 4 different buses, all doing the same trip as you. But regardless of this it still seemed to go pretty quickly and only took us about an hour to get through Peru and Bolivian customs.

The bus dropped us off at the Peru boarder where we waited at the police check for them to stamp our immigration card, then head next door to the immigration office where they collect the immigration card and stamped our passport. After that we walked over the boarder to the Bolivian side where we got our entry stamp into Bolivia and re-boarded our bus.

Our plan was to go straight from Puno to La Paz and not stop in Copacabana since we had  done Lake Titicaca on the Peru side. We  had also read  that there was no bank machines in Cocpacabana, which would have been an issue for us since we had no Bolivian money and  little Peruvian money left. Although we did learn that you should have a little Bolivian money when crossing the boarder. Thankfully Trevor had to go to the washroom at the boarder, so he got change from our Peruvian money in Bolivian dollars, which we needed since each person has to pay $1 Bolivian dollar just to pass into Copacabana.

We also discovered that even if you buy a ticket to La Paz all the buses stop for 1.5 hrs in Copacabana before combining everyone into the same bus to head La Paz.  This is actually quite nice because you can pretty much walk around all of Copacabana in this time and it's worthwhile to visit the church during this time. We also discovered that even though we had bought a ticket to La Paz for that day we still could have stayed overnight in Copacabana and just taken the bus onwards on another day.

We did find out that there is a bank machine in Copacabana but the one thing we learned in Bolivia is that our bank cards/credit cards would only work in half their machines. At the bank machine in Copacabana there were 5 of us in line and the machine only worked for 2 of us - and I wasn't one of them, so this just reinforced that we should continue to head to La Paz. So 1.5 hours later we boarded the bus to La Paz and while on route we were actually surprised when we had to get off and board a tiny little boat to cross 100 meter of water and pay $1.50 Bolivians each for the boat. So again we were glad we had a little money and after we crossed we watched as our boat travelled across on it's own platform before re boarding and continuing our journey

Upon arriving in La Paz we expected to be dropped off at the bus station which was actually really close to our hostel but instead they dropped us off on a street downtown. Having just arrived we had no idea where we were at the time so thankfully we were able to find a bank machine that would accept our card and grab a cab to our hostel.