Alright, that last email I wrote makes me laugh because just like usual on this trip, nothing that I mentioned has gone according to plan. It turned out I couldn't go to Quillabamba because there was a landslide blocking the only road that goes there from Cuzco. At that point I was a bit anxious to get out of Cuzco, so I told Braddy I was going to begin my travels in the Bolivia direction a bit early and that I would meet him in La Paz. On Monday I bought my ticket to Puno for Wednesday morning, only to arrive at the terminal and find that there had been a roadblock strike going on since Monday and that no buses were leaving during the day. I changed my ticket to that night and left at 10 pm. On a trip that was supposed to take six hours, the bus stopped at 5:30 am and informed all its passengers that it could not go any further and we were going to have to get off and walk. So at 5:30 am in the freezing cold with my little rolling suitcase, I walked about a half hour over a bridge, from where I had to take two mini-buses to get to Puno, finally arriving at 8:30 am. I was happy to finally be there.
Well, then my friend Braddy was busy for awhile with an art show and by the time he got done with that he informed me that he was sorry but he no longer had the time, money, or energy to come to Bolivia. Such is life.
But I will start from the beginning of my travelling adventures. As I've mentioned, my first destination was Puno, a small tourist city on the shore of Lake Titicaca, which is the highest freshwater lake in the world and was sacred to the Incas. The Lake is split between Peru and Bolivia, and a Bolivian friend I recently met on a bus told me Bolivians like to say that the 'Titi' belongs to Bolivia and the 'caca' to Peru ('caca' in Spanish means 'shit'). In reality though, the whole of the lake is quite gorgeous. Anyway, after a day spent wandering around Puno (in a day you can do pretty much everything there is to do in Puno) I took a boat to two different islands in Lake Titicaca, Amantani and Taquile. Taquile was particularly interesting to me because at Middlebury I wrote a paper dealing with the weaving tradition and tourism there. The paradox of the island is that it's both a fabricated tourist attraction and an isolated place where people really do still live somewhat 'traditionally,' if you ignore the island's many rstaurants and bars. Amantani is less touristy and people there live more 'rustically', but they do have one little tourist-attracting niche, which is staging little 'discotecas' for tourists at night in which they dress you up in the traditional clothing that they themselves don't wear anymore and everyone dances to a band playing traditional music. It's quite a show. While on the Peru side of the lake I also visited a couple of the Floating Islands, which are man-made islands built completely of reeds, no more than 20 meters in diameter. These communities were initially built as a way for people to escape from widespread tribal warfare, and people still live quiet lives there in tiny communities although they now get things like education and medical services in Puno. They're something you really have to see to believe.
After visiting those islands, I continued across the Bolivian border to Copacabana. On the bus ride there I met a fellow traveller from Morocco and another French guy that the Moroccan guy had met on the bus from Cuzco to Puno. The three of us decided to spend the night on the Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun), which is the mythical birthplace of the Incan civilization. Ironically, the first night there we got caught in a hail storm and ended up just sitting in our hostel drinking cheap, gross Bolivian wine and chewing coca leaves. The next day was a little clearer and Romain (the Frenchie) and I hiked to some really cool labyrinth-like ruins on one side of the island before taking the boat back to Copacabana.
After that I continued on to La Paz and spent two days there hanging out with Tarik (the Moroccan), visiting markets and museums, and the usual stuff you do in cities. While Lake Titicaca is the highest freshwater lake in the world, La Paz boasts being the highest capital, at something like 3800 meters above sea level. The main part of the city is situated in a bit of a valley, but like Lima, the outer boundaries of the city just keep growing due to people migrating there from the country, and from several lookout towers in the city you can see just how packed all the buildings are on the side of the mountains. It's pretty impressive.
It just so happened that Tarik was also planning on doing a tour of the salt flats and desert near Uyuni, so I decided to go with him. It was a very uncomfortable 12-hour overnight bus ride down to Uyuni, which is a freezing cold, isolated and desolate town which earns its livelihood almost completely from tourism. There are dozens of tour agencies that do three-day tours of the desert, and we ended up going with a different tour agency than we had made the reservation with, which apparently happens a lot. The tour group consisted of me, Tarik, two youngish Polish couples, and a local tour guide and cook, all packed snugly into a jeep. The tour was memorable both for the spectacular scenery (only my photos can describe that, which I unfortunately might not be able to posr online until I get home) and for the fact that the tour itself was comically bad. The guide and cook seemed intent on speaking to us as little as possible. The jeep arrived at the tour agency an hour late the first day, then stopped at several places around town to pick up a few personal items and some food items that our guides had neglected to pick up beforehand. Every time we arrived at one of the sites the guide would tell us we had 15 minutes to walk around, then after ten minutes would yell, 'Let's go, let's go, we're late!' On top of that, the cook made a hot dog casserole for the two vegetarians on the trip, then on the last morning when we asked for the scrambled eggs we had been promised, said that there were eggs in the bread. She finally brought us a bowl of scrambled eggs but without forks and plates to eat it with. Following breakfast we revolted and spent an hour and a half in the hot springs mostly just to piss of the guide. Because of this we arrived lateat the town in which we were apparently supposed to stop and get gas (the guide had told us nothing about this, of course) and the gas station was closed. But instead of telling us that he was going to try to find the owner of the gas station, the guide pretended we were at another stop in the trip and asked if we wanted to get out and see the local market or church. This resulted in all of us being quite confused when we ended up waiting 45 minutes for him to come back. We arrived back in the frigid Uyuni at 8:30, 2 and a half hours late. The good thing was that we all got along really well and were able to laugh at all the silly mishaps. Unfortunately we arrived back too late to stage a protest in front of the travel agency.
At the point of reaching the Chilean border on the last day we parted with Tarik, who was continuing on to Valparaiso. Coincidentally, me and the two Polish couples all had the same plan, which was to move on to the religious and mining center of Potosi, where I am now. On the bus here I was sitting next to and chatting with a Bolivian guy who is studying in Sucre, which just happens to be my next destination. The city of Potosi supposedly has a fascinating history, of which I know little because I unfortunately do not have the Lonely Planet Guide to Bolivia (this appears to be an essential). My Bolivian friend told me that at some point in history it was the biggest city in the world. Anyway, despite my ignorance, I am highly looking forward to taking a tour of one of the cooperative mines tomorrow. More on this to come.
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