El gran viaje 2007

Well, we´ve officially been in Arequipa for a week-- a long time in the backpacking world. Aside from our rough start and a super-noisy hostel, we´ve had a nice, relaxing time here.

We spent our first few days just hanging out-- walking around the city center a little bit, trying restaurants, going to the movies. And then we spent our next few days, well just doing all that some more. I am not ashamed to say we spent an entire day sitting on bean bags and watching TV.

Finally on Sunday, after a comedy of errors involving lost peices of paper and wrong numbers, we got a hold of Sergio´s relatives here and on Sunday and Monday they showed us around their city a little bit. And okay, we saw another movie.

Then yesterday we decided we had better actually do something in order to justify spending so much of our last precious weeks here, so we headed out on a two-day tour of the Colca Canyon. The Colca Canyon is the deepest canyon in the world, or so they say around here. The scenery was beautiful and we had a nice two days. The highlight was the hour spent watching the endangered Andean condors soar across the canyon at the Cruz del Condor.

I think Sergio and I may just be ready to move on from Arequipa though, and we´ll be heading up to Lima (with a few stops along the way) soon.

(no photos because I´m out of space for June... oops!)

At 5 am yesterday morning I was peacefully asleep on an overnight bus from Cuzco to Arequipa. At 5:30, I was still asleep but the double-decker bus had rolled to a stop in a random, run-down suburb of the city. Nearly there but not quite. By 6 am, I was awake, listening confused to the commotion on the bus. One guy a few seats behind us was saying, "I just want to have my coffee and get out of here." An English woman told her daughter "Not sure, I think we´re in a traffic jam of some kind."

Well, it wasn´t exactly a traffic jam. It was a road block. We could see the lights of Arequipa below us in the distance. The sun was just rising. By 6:15 Sergio and I were just about the only people left on the bus. The young attendant (it was a luxury bus) was telling everyone they were welcome to wait it out in the bus, or if we wanted to walk we´d be in the city in about an hour.

By 6:30 we had our backpacks on and were walking beside the dozens of stopped buses and trucks. It only took us a few minutes to get to the road block itself. It was a mass of people yelling, burning tires, and throwing the biggest rocks they could find onto the two-lane highway. "Watch out for the pedestrians," someone called out as we nervously ducked under a strip of yellow caution tape. Yeah, please don´t throw a rock at us.

Once we got past the hordes of rock-throwers, I optimistically thought that maybe we could find a taxi to take us into the city, which shouldn´t have been too far.

By 7:30 we were still walking, no cars in sight except for a few police vans. And then it was 8:00, and then 8:30. Locals walking the other way stared at us and the other gringos around us. Sergio and I ate the Snickers bars I´d bought at the Cuzco bus station for breakfast. We dumped out most of the 2 liters of water we still had-- it was too heavy. By 9:00 we were exhausted, still walking through dusty suburbs, nothing bigger than a bicycle on the rock-strewn road. We walked past the airport, which according to the Lonely Planet was 8 kilometers northwest of the city. It was getting hot.

At about 9:30 the road finally split and it started to look like we were in a real city. Billboards advertised Arequipeña beer. People walking along the road in both directions carried their plastic duffel bags on their shoulders, on their heads. People were laying exhausted on the grass median.

Sergio had just thrown his pack on a pile of rocks for a little rest when we finally saw and successfully hailed a little yellow taxi. "Hurry up," the driver said as we struggled to get our packs into the back seat with us, "get in before those crazies come." Six nuevo soles and ten minutes later we were at our hostel, our fancy bus most likely in the same spot we had left it in three hours earlier.

So Sergio and I have finally made it to the heart of Peru-- Cusco. We crossed the border two days ago after a final stint in Bolivia on Lake Titicaca.

Copacabana is a quiet, sleepy (okay, it´s just boring) place, in a beautiful location right on Lake Titicaca. We spent two days there, which was plenty of time to walk around the main street and visit Copa´s cathedral (which looks remarkably like a mosque, by the way). We saw the blessing of the cars, a ritual that takes place most days in front of the cathedral where people drive their new cars up to have them splashed with holy water and alcohol and adorned with tassled banners declaring faith to the Virgin of Copacabana. We also ate a lot of trout, the local specialty.

We spent one night on the Isla del Sol in a super-fancy (well, for us) eco-lodge--a kind of birthday present for Sergio. We wanted to take advantage of our comfy lodgings, so we did a few short walks around the island and mostly just looked at the beautiful view from our cabin´s window. We also managed to see yet another festival-- they seem to happen everyday around here, and they almost always involve loud marching bands. The island was gorgeous, and although there were plenty of tourists they seemed to keep to just a few corners and mostly life continued as usual-- animals grazing, people harvesting quinoa, and of course the marching bands.

After Copa we crossed the border into Peru, which was pretty staightforward except that Sergio and I overstayed our Bolivian tourist visas by one day (oops) and had to pay a little fine. By noon on Thursday we were in Puno, on the Peruvian side of the lake.

Puno was not the greatest introduction to Peru, and our hotel was pretty dingy so we were happy to quickly see the Islas Flotantes on a packaged tour on Thursday afternoon and then hop on the bus for Cusco on Friday morning. The Islas Flotantes (Floating Islands) were an amazing sight-- man-made of reeds and hundreds of years old (the reeds are constantly replenished) by the Uros people. We even got to ride on an extremely crowded reed boat between islands.

We decided to skip the regular overnight bus and took a luxury tour bus to Cusco that stopped at different sights along the way. It was a nice way to see some of the ruins and towns between Puno and Cusco that otherwise would be a pain to get to. The highlight was the colonial church in Andahuaylillas, which had obviously Islamic details but also incorporated Andean religious symbols like corn stalks and the sun-- an odd mix to find up in the mountains of Peru.

It´s nice to be in Cusco after being in a series of tiny one-road towns, and we plan to hang out here for as long as it´s interesting before heading to Arequipa. We´ve pretty much abandoned our plans to stay here for Inti Raymi, a huge festival that will take place next week, because we´re ready to move on and because we´ve seen soooo many festivals already (in fact, today we got to see the tail end of Corpus Christi here in Cusco-- with plenty of marching bands).

Anyone who has ever been to La Paz knows about the World´s Most Dangerous Road, because I´m pretty sure it´s forbidden to leave La Paz without going down it on a mountain bike. Even if, like me, you haven´t been on a bicycle since you were a kid. A little kid.

Anyway, we started early Tuesday morning at La Cumbre, the start of the road down to Coroico in the tropical Yungas region of Bolivia. La Cumbre is definitely not tropical, and we all started flying down the road bundled up in warm hats and fleeces. After just a few hours, everyone was wearing t-shirts and we had descended thousands of feet. That was about the point in the journey when the smooth, paved road turned into a single lane dirt road with stunning cliffs on the left side-- the World´s Most Dangerous Road (it´s also called the Death Road, by the way). Our guide assured us that no one had ever died on the ride with them (although there had been lots of broken bones and some rescues over the cliffs), which made me feel a little better flying around sharp corners at what felt like full speed to me.

We made it though, after about five hours on the road, to the Senda Verde, an animal refuge at the end of the road where we had lunch and got our free beer and t-shirt. The climate was completely different from La Paz-- humid and hot, with tropical trees and flowers everywhere. Sergio and I took advantage and stayed the night there, hanging out with the spider monkeys and the volunteers and hitching a ride back to La Paz with the group that rode down the next day.

So after our little detour we´re back in La Paz for a few days, which we´ll be spending doing things like backing up photos and laundry, getting used to the altitude again, and recovering from the World´s Most Dangerous Road.

We´ve been in La Paz now for almost four days, and there has not been a boring moment. Not one. Well, we did watch American Idol last night but that wasn´t really because we were bored. Just tired.

We spent our first two days in La Paz just taking things in. We wandered down the Prado, ate some excellent food, visited the archaeology museum and La Paz´s famous Witches´Market. The Witches Market is amazing because it´s a actually pretty authentic (nothing like you´d find in say, Salem Massachusetts). In fact, we wandered down the street gawking at the dried llama fetuses, the potions, the candles, and the talismans too intimidated to get too close. I think we´ll have to go back and actually buy something there.

Yesterday we woke up early, planning on jumping on a tour bus to Tiwanaku, an important pre-Inca site between La Paz and Lake Titacaca. It was not to be however-- the tour company had overbooked the tour and left our names off the list. We were going to insist on getting our money back when they offered us a free tour to Chacaltaya, a ski resort (it´s not ski season) outside of La Paz. We agreed because we like free things, even though we hadn´t been planning on checking Chacaltaya out.

The tour stopped first at the Valle de la Luna, a well-kept park just by the southern suburbs of La Paz with a weird lunar landscape. We walked around the park, which had beautiful views of the city, and then it was off to Chacaltaya, in the opposite direction north of the city. It took us two hours to get there, and our van had to fight traffic all the way through El Alto, a city right next to La Paz, poorer and scruffier but with a bigger population than La Paz itself.

Finally we made it to Chacaltaya, which turned out to really be a ghost of a ski resort with barely any snow. The attraction here is really the views of the mountains around La Paz. We climbed the last 100 meters (trust me, at 5,000 meters high this was not as easy as it sounds) to the peak of the mountain, where we could just barely see Lake Titicaca on the horizon.

When we got back to our hotel, we let ourselves have a quick rest but then it was back out on the streets for the biggest festival in La Paz, el Gran Poder. The festival was essentially a parade down the Prado with group after group of traditional dancers in elaborate costumes. Or so we were told by people who could actually see it. Undemocratically, the view of the parade was blocked by huge tarps, reinforced by security guards yelling at anyone who tried to peek through the plastic. To really see the parade, you had to wait in a huuuuge line and, of course, pay for a seat on the bleaches. Sergio and I were happy just walking up and down the Prado, observing the mayhem, and peeking through the tarps when we thought we could get away with it. The party went on well after dark, but not for me and Sergio because we were exhausted and we had another early morning on Sunday.

This morning we got up early in order to finally get to Tiwanaku, which we actually did manage to do this time. Our guide to the site was generally informative, but he got a few rolled eyes when he insisted that Macchu Picchu was really a Tiwanakan site and that the Aymara people had come on boats from China 20,000 years ago and had a language and writing system that was similar to Chinese (the one they had 20,000 years ago?). It reminded me of the "Lebanese invented purple" spiel all the tour guides gave in Lebanon, except with less truth to it. Tiwanaku was not a disappointment, but aesthetically it wasn´t too exciting, since the Bolivians have only just started excavating the site and it mostly just looks like lumps of dirt. And I don´t think Sergio appreciates lumps of dirt as much as I do. But it was nice to see a major pre-Inca site, and hopefully it will give us a context for the many Inca sites we will see in the next few months.