Our trip to Bolivia to attend the Oruro Carnaval was awesome, but, um, had a few kinks. Since I’m our primary tour guide down here, we decided that overall I earned a D- for my efforts on this trip.

Find amazing Carnaval celebration to attend
Score: Excellent
I’m pretty proud of finding Oruro. It’s a small town in Bolivia, with a “World Heritage Event” Carnaval… It’s no Rio, but within easy reach of Arequipa and the event felt more like participating in a culture celebration than just watching naked/drunk people. (Bonus: There were minimal foreign travelers. Most of the people were from surrounding towns.)

Travel from Arequipa to Oruro
Score: Good
Traveling to Oruro was easy. We took an overnight bus to La Paz (arriving at 4pm the next day), stayed the night in La Paz, and then took an early bus the next morning to Oruro. I slept for most of the trip, Scott worked, and we breezed through the border crossing. (By the way, La Paz was an amazing city. It literally flows up and over the surrounding mountains. I’m sad we won’t be able to go back there given Visa issues, which is why I’m giving myself a “Good” instead of “Excellent” on this one. More details on that below.)

Hotel in Oruro
Score: Good
We weren’t able to reserve ahead of time, so we stumbled around Oruro for a few hours trying to find a hotel. Most places were booked, and I was prepared to sleep in the bleachers. We ended up a scoring a room in a hotel on the parade route called Hotel Florydia. Close enough to the action, but also had a room in the back to retreat to when needed.

Celebrating Carnaval in Oruro
Score: Excellent
The Carnaval celebration in Oruro was so amazing. I’m going to need another day to play with the photos and post them online… The entire town is taken over by Carnaval celebrations, including a parade that lasted from 9am to 4am on both Saturday and Sunday. It’s all about music, dancing and singing. With lots of water fighting, drinking, and coca leaf chewing. It was pretty intense.

Getting out of Oruro with all of our stuff
Score: Needs Improvement
At one point, Scott had his retainers and a tin of Altoids stolen out of his backpack. We are pretty sure it was the drunk guy who kept telling us he spoke English. Scott also misplaced our only remaining debit card. (Um, mine was eaten by an ATM a few weeks ago, because I tried the wrong pin number one too many times.)

Travel from Oruro to Arequipa
Score: Needs Improvement
We ended up taking four different buses to get from Oruro to Arequipa. We made it, but it was not ideal.

  • Oruro > La Paz: Easy. There were hundreds of buses leaving on Monday.
  • La Paz > Copacabana: Not really a ‘bus’, more like one of those community transit coaches the city uses for disabled people. Packed with 30 people. Seven of those people were still drunk, loud and smelly from the night before. Two of those seven made out the entire ride to Copacabana. Entertaining at the very least.
  • Copacabana > Puno: I almost missed this bus because I was off getting food in Copacabana. And then we almost missed it again due to a problem at the border.
  • Puno > Arequipa: Scored front row seats with extra leg room. Even Scott got a little bit of sleep. Arrived home at 1:30am.

Bribing border crossing agent to get back into Peru
Score: Excellent Plus!
Apparently we were supposed to pay for a Visa when we entered Bolivia. Nobody told us! I’ll go into all the gritty details in another post.