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Other than seeing a young girl get hit by a car it was a usual border crossing day...
We woke up, got some pastries from the local shop, loaded the bike and started the 2 hour ride towards the Bolivian border near the south end of Lake Titicaca. Most travelers would take the route through the city of Copacabana, however the road had been block by protesters so we decided to cross at Desaguadero. US citizens are required to purchase a visa for $135 dollars (ouch) at the border to enter Bolivia. Our guide book stated that it would be possible to purchase a visa for $100 at the Bolivian Consulate in Puno. While in Puno, we checked the consulate and they said we would still have to pay the $135 along with a list of other requirements such as a copy of a credit card, small passport like photo, a print out of a hotel reservation and a detailed itinerary of the cities we would be visiting. We decided to just purchase the visa at the border as it would probably be less paperwork and that turned out to be correct.
We arrived at the border around 10am just after a couple of tourist buses just unloaded a huge crowd of people needing to get their passports stamped. Luckily the line went pretty quickly. Next, we crossed into Bolivia and got our visas, passport stamps and our import documents for the motos. It took awhile but otherwise went pretty smoothly.
Our planned stop for the night was the city of Viacha in order to bypass entering the capital city of La Paz (the highest capital city in the world), but due to the unknown state of the dirt road between the highway and Viacha we decided to cross into the edge of La Paz before heading south to Viacha. It was starting to get dark, so we decided to start looking around for hotels near the highway but with no luck. We probably drove around for 2 hours before we finally made it to Viacha and found the only hotel in town. While waiting in the main square for someone to show us the way to the "Garage" (house were we would be parking the motorcycles for the night), we saw a young girl get hit by a taxi and thrown in the air. We both ran over, along with other locals, to see if she was all right. She seemed to be fine just a little shaken up. At this point the taxi driver started to drive through the crowd of people trying to flee the scene. I happened to be standing in front of his exit path and sort of stood over the hood of his car, however this did not stop him. He continued to accelerate as I got out of his way... and kicked his car. Some other locals got his license plate number and reported it to the cab company. Not really sure what became of the taxi driver.
Tomorrow we attempt to get away from the dense and traffic ridden city of La Paz.