The journey from Santa Cruz to La Paz was LONG and painful. My sickness was growing in the heat and
the 3 hour bus journey immediately followed by a 20 hour bus journey to La Paz
did not help in the slightest and it was one of the longest and most uncomfortable
journeys. After we fell asleep on the Santa Cruz side of Bolivia watching all
the tropical trees we woke up in desert. Strange half-finished buildings lined
the road for the last few hours it took to enter La Paz, just millions of arid
land and broken bits and traditional woman and men wrapped in colourful cloth
lay to the sides of us, the woman nine times out of ten with a baby wrapped
around her back.
And then the bus started to descend
into the weirdest looking city I’ve ever seen. It reminded me of what I thought
Tashban would look like in the Narnia books, dusty buildings built upon dusty
buildings in this humongous valley, terraces and terraces and more
half-finished buildings and people and many colour of brown. The clothes of the
people had changed from tropical wear to winter clothes and the sky was
overcast.
So La Paz is the centre for tourists to
buy stuff because it is colourful, plentiful and very economical! I had no
previous intention of buying anything yet I walked away with some colourful
shoes, a wallet, a lama jersey, a moonbag and pants for roman. After sleeping
most of the day away, I felt well enough to walk around and Juanita and I ate
some Mexican food and found some Amazonian Peruvians playing traditional music
with a pan flute and the Charango which is a ukulele-mandolin like instrument
and we smiled and enjoyed their music and they tried to feed us incredibley
strong white alcohol which we declined. And when one of them decided they
wanted to take Juanita away with them (perhaps to the amazon) we decided it was
time to leave our music playing quartet.
We bought our bus tickets the following
day for Cocacabana (The Bolivan one, not the Brazilian one, on the shores of
Lake Titicaca) and on Roman’s recommendation we decided to see if we could
check out the La Paz prison. Apparently this prison is unique in that it is
self-governed in that people are allowed to have their families in there and
it’s almost like a small village within itself. Well, I looked it up online and
read someone’s blog who went there and at the end of the post he wrote “A few
months after we went, a few tourists tried to go in and were caught by the
police and deported from the country and fined heavily.” Apparently some guy
wrote a book about it and now everyone wants to see it and thus they are not
too happy about letting tourists in for an illegal tour. Well regardless we
figured we should check it out so check it out we did. We looked inside the
courtyard to see tons of people milling around and a strict looking policemen
outside and when we went to the entrance we were told to go away. So we got the
hint and decided not to be deported and thus we took a few sneaky pictures of
not much and went away. Exciting nonetheless.
Our next bus took us 4 hours to
Cocacabana and there it was- Lake Titicaca! The highest navigable lake in the
world which I think means people need boats to get across. It was big and blue and beautiful and
Cocacabana was doing a very good job of acting like a small beach resort with
no actual beach to lie on yet we took a little duck peddle boat on the water,
reaffirmed that peddle boats are the WORST (regardless of how cool they look in
10 things I Hate About You, yet if there’s no Heath Ledger to have romantic
paintball with then it’s just not the same) and we settled down on the shore
for a juice. I was wearing my shirt that says “I (picture of moustache) you a
question and a man called out “I must ask you a question. Haha very good” and
that was the beginning of a relationship that went well into our journey. We
were introduced to Magnus and Anna from England and, believe it or not, Tucker
Cashdoller from Tennessee. They liked to drink a lot of beer and say a lot of
ridiculous things and laugh a lot and we joined in on the laughter and later
went to dinner all together and we got convinced to drink wine (although still
sick from extreme altitude) and although my body told me half a bottle of wine
was not going to help me, amazingly Juanita and I both woke up feeling like
heroes the next day and so climbed a mountain with our ukuleles and diaries,
taking headstand pictures and burning what we wrote because it was that kind of
day and we were on top of the world.
We woke up early the following day
ready for our walk to Isla de Sol which is the pretty Island of the Sun with
Inca ruins. The supposed 23 km walk only took us about 4 hours and near the end
we met a man who tried to offer us a ride in his boat to look at some other
Inca ruins on the way and then to Isla de Sol. He then showed us his name in 3
different travel books (including the Lonely Planet) and he showed us a million
postcards he had received from tourists over the years. It was a bit of a sad
story really because he used to be the guy who took everyone to Isla de sol until
they built the ferry at Cocacabana so people didn’t have to walk or taxi to
this guy. He used to build his boat out of humongous reeds and I think we would
have accepted his offer if this was the case but all he had was a motorboat and
we were loving the walk. He was getting upset as we were not going to say yes
and a dog stole an egg and he stopped smiling and jumped up in a rage and threw
a giant log at the dog barely missing my face by a few centimeters. We decided
then that this was our time to make a getaway and we said a quick
"Gracias!" and walked rapidly away. But, I think when I go home I
will send him a postcard just because out of all 150 postcards we looked at
there was not a single one from Africa.
We reached the dock, got on the boat and
10 minutes later we arrived in Isla de sol, hiked our way around and up the
mountain until we found a heavenly view for our tent and read and wrote in our
diaries as the sun went down. The next day was a slow walk… the Isla de Sol is
high and I mean HIGH and even if you are not altitude sick every incline feels
like your chest is going to close in on you. On the way we crashed into dear
Magnus and Anna again and shared a laugh and some information and continued on
our way to the Inca ruins. At the Inca Ruins we got on our hands and knees and
drank some special Inca healing water and Juanita made some environmental art
while I knitted and we looked at the water down below, kind of wanting to swim
yet also aware that every long descent is a long ascent and that is a painful
proposition. Some boys came by discussing swimming and thus I was inspired and
followed them down the mountain to the clean and COLD waters of the lake. We followed the boys back to the North town where
we were sleeping that night and pitched our tent on a beach full of Argentinian
hippies (apparently they had been camping there, singing, juggling and drinking
for a week so far) and found an awesome place for omelette and chips. We bought
a bottle of wine and drank it and chatted about everything and finally went to
sleep.
We woke up early, keen to hike to the other side of the
island to ferry back to Cocacabana. At the ferry on the other side of the
mountain we met up with our friends from the day before and Magnus and Anna who
we told to come stay at our hostel as it was cheap and had wifi. And then,
well, we messed around Cococabana for a few days and did, well, not much as we
were waiting for Roman to meet us in Puno which was a few hours away and would
officially be not Bolivia but then Peru. It was time to go and find him and we
woke up early and took some local buses, the Peruvian border control stamped
our passports with no hassle and we made our way to the other side of lake
Titicaca in Puno, followed Magnus and Anna to their hostel, went for breakfast
and waited for Roman.
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