January 4th 2014, Puno Cusco
After reading so many stories and blogs and travel forums on scams, we still ended up getting scammed! I guess I'll begin with the Puno tour. Jhonathan told us he has a friend in Puno who organises tours so he could arrange everything with him for us, including our bus tickets from Cusco to Puno - an 8 hour bus ride. Our Swiss friend told us that she'd paid 82 soles for a cama (sleeper) bus so we paid that amount for our bus and got tickets on "San Luis".
On the 3rd night, we hurriedly get to the bus station after many pisco sours and Chilcanos, ready for a good night's sleep. We don't see our bus anywhere so we begin to panic running around with our huge havasacks. Additionally, in Peru, you need to pay a lot of taxes, tourist tax, entrance tax, leaving tax etc so we were very confused.
To our luck, we met a Colombian couple meant to travel on the same bus so we hung out with them. By 10:20pm, our 10 pm bus still hadn't shown up and all the others began to leave, so we started getting worried. Finally, the Colombians found out that our bus doesn't actually exist/didn't intend on showing up so we were to get on another bus. This was not a sleeper bus. The tickets on this bus cost 30 soles each. SCAMMED!!!
We tried arguing but the bus guy feigned ignorance, it looked like he's familiar with this routine and so we had to just take any available seat and stew in silence. In the midst of the drama, Berns thought it unsafe to keep our bags in the luggage compartment and so we sat with our bags on top of us, but poor Bernie holding on to our big bags left in the aisle.
We decided to go to sleep and not get annoyed, which I did quite promptly. Then at about 4 am, I woke up as the bus pulled in to a petrol pump. At this point, Bernie got out of his seat to close the door that separates the bottom level from the stairs going up so there's less noise. As he did this, an older Peruvian lady began yelling at him: " no, no, Walter esta aqui... No." Poor Berns, thoroughly confused didn't know what she was saying and kept shutting and opening the doors of the toilet and our compartment door. "Donde esta Walter?" And then she realised Walter wasn't on the bus and it had begun to move and she began yelling to Bernie to stop the bus. I understood the whole thing, but poor Bernie was still opening and closing doors, no idea about poor Walter!
Everyone kept shouting to doorman Bernie until finally another man sitting near us ran to the front and stopped the bus. Then we hung around for 20 minutes with the old lady shouting "walteeeeer, Donde esta?" and the bus kept honking, until finally Walter shows up with no explanation whatsoever. So random!
I really enjoyed the scene and went back to sleep, but when i awoke an hour late in Puno, the hours of sleep made me really angry that we got cheated and I wanted to fight with someone. Poor Mahatma Gandhi Bernie just wanted a quiet non violent morning, but no such luck. We got picked up by Edison from the tour and he seemed so sweet but I was too angry to chat with him. We left our bags at his shop for the night as our tour of the floating islands began at 8 am and we'd only return the following day.
By the time we got to the port and on our lovely boat, I was in a much better mood. For now. The floating islands deserves it's own post.
When Jhonathan told us about the islands, he pronounced it "floating ice-lands". Keeping in mind that English is his third language, I still didn't get that he meant "Islands". So I'm now on this tour looking for floating bits of ice in the middle on lake Titicaca where local people live.
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