Problems at the border - La Paz, Bolivia - June 2011

We took our luxurious flight to La Paz and checked back into the delightful Arty's Guest House, where Arty remembered us from last time.

The cheese buffet restaurant in La Paz. Richard should never have had this big beer - it made him get altitude sickness though.

The four hour bumpy ride to Tiwanaku, it was supposed to be an hour and a half. One of the roads was closed and there was much  heated debate between the locals and the bus driver as to which route was the 'best' - in Bolivian terms. After cutting across traffic a few times and several quick swerves, we seemed to take a route which nobody was happy with.

The entrance. Richard with the two French lads who enjoyed our adventure with us.

Erlend made another friend, Dinosaur.

The famous 'Sun Door'.

There were some amazing monoliths there. Inside the museum (where no photos were allowed), there was a gigantic on, about ten metres high. In the museum we became swamped by local school children. The girls were very sweet and wanted to practice their English and find out about us, the boys just wanted to shout 'Hello baby' to Richard. It did make us laugh!

Waiting for the infrequent minibus back. Several had left the small town and bypassed the museum ( we could see them temptingly coming towards us only to turn of 100 metres up the road). Eventually, Richard and I walked into the town, found one and made it go via the museum to collect the Frenchmen.

With our time we had left, we thought we might take a three day trip to the Bolivian jungle. However, for a few weeks we had been hearing from fellow travellers of the Lake Titicaca border between Peru and Bolivia being blockaded by the Peruvians protesting about the elections.

Every person you talked to said something different - it appeared that some days people could get through, others they couldn't. We decided not to chance it as we had already been this way and took a short (8 hours) detour south  via Arica in Chile. As it turned out, this worked in our favour as it led us along the Pacific coast, which we may have missed and another amazing Andes crossing.