The cold land that is Bolivia

Today in Santa Cruz de la Sierra it is 23 degrees and sunny. A decent wind blows and the local punters stroll about the Plaza 24 de Septiembre eating ice cream and looking fabulous. BMWs and Porsches roll along the streets and there is boutique shopping to be had all over the place. We are both finding it hard to believe that we are still in Bolivia. There are no llamas in the streets, no beggars, actual trees grow forth from the ground and the air is sweet and humid. We left La Paz from its El Alto airport at 4,010m yesterday wrapped in our fleeces, thermals and beanies which is basically the way we dressed every day while in Bolivia.

Leaving Peru was not as simple as it should have been. We were aware that strikes were taking place in the general triangular area between Cusco, Arequipa and Puno. We asked around and researched as far as we could and were assured that if we took one particular bus, they would take a slightly different route to avoid the strikes and arrive in Puno for a connection which would take us to the border at Desaguadero and on to La Paz. We thought we'd made a good decision as there were a lot of locals on the bus with us - surely a sign that this time we would not be purposefully lied to by another Peruvian. The bus left at 10:00pm and stopped in sub-zero darkness at around 4:00am. Nobody knew where we were and the locals who had paid for their service to Puno were a tad irate (welcome to our world). We drove a little further until the sun came up, then after the driver and his helper fucked around and failed to make a decision of any kind for an hour, we grabbed our bags and walked for two hours in the freezing post-dawn light across the physical roadblocks, somewhere a long way from Puno.

The remainder of the trip went like this: 11-seat Combi with 23 passengers from that place to Juliaca, 11-seat Combi with between 11 and 20 passengers from Juliaca to Puno, taxi with a girl from the mid-west United States (Greenbay Packers fan) from Puno to Desaguadero, passport control and so forth, taxi with US girl to La Paz. Total expected travel time - 12 hours. Total actual travel time - 18 hours. Thank god we were out of Peru!

We dropped our passports with the requisite paperwork into the Brazillian Embassy as soon as we hit La Paz so that we could plan our route out of the Andes and onto the East Coast of South America. We got them in on a Friday and had to wait for the weekend to pass and pick them up on the following Tuesday. This meant that we couldn't go to either Lake Titicaca or Rurrenabaque as we would need the passport on both of those journeys. So we took Chris and Hamish's advice and booked a day's mountain biking on the 'World's Most Dangerous Road' with B-Side Adventures. These folks were a darn fine outfit: dual suspension bikes, good food and a top guide who made the ride go from feeling like it could be rather dangerous into a thoroughly enjoyable and safe day.

Back to the Embassy and we picked up our visas with no hassles. We're going to Brazil!

Our next stop was to follow Mike's suggestion and go to Rurrenabaque for a visit to the Pampas. We also took his suggestion to avoid the minimum 20-hour bus journey there and to fly instead. Far more expensive, far more enjoyable. We wanted to check out the jungle too, as it would be our only trip to the Amazon.

The pampas was absolutely top shelf. Loads of animals and birds including alligators, caimans, pink dolphins, red pirhana, macaws, monkeys, anaconda, kingfishers and many many more. Cruising up and down the narrow muddy river on a long boat with the alligator-, caiman- and pirhana-infested waters every day was a real treat. We decided not to swim with the dolphins because as with a lot of Australians, we have read accounts of the stupid tourists going for a dip in the cool clear waters in the Daintree and only to be swallowed by a big nasty croc. When there are 'gators and caimans on the banks and flesh eating pirhana in the water, you just don't go swimming. Three days of pampas down, two day of jungle to go.

We jumped back in a larger boat after a night in town at Rurre and went in the opposite direction to the pampas and into the jungle. Our arrival at the lodge in the trees some hours later was not quite as exciting as I had hoped, because the jungle looked very, very similar to the rainforest on Fraser Island. Sure it's pretty, but not the impenetrable stuff that makes the use of a large and sharp machete 100% necessary and that which I had been hoping for. We saw one monkey and one bird in our two days, and both of those were from a large distance away. Our guide was crap too, but it was still nice to get out amongst some trees.

No sooner had we made it back to La Paz for the night than we were on another bus out to Lake Titicaca. It's high up there, 3,810m to be precise. Nadine had said that the views from the Isla del Sol reminded her of the Cyclades in Greece, a place I had visited twice in the past. And fair play to her, but there were echoes of Greece to be found there. Actually the landscape views may have been more impressive with the gigantic range of the Cordillera Real lined up from left to right, though here was no resemblance to be found in the architecture. After two nights on the Isla and with only a few days left before our departure to Brazil, it was time to move on. So this we did and were lucky enough to run into and dine with our Danish pals from the Canon de Colca trek out of Arequipa a few weeks ago.

We have a plane booked to fly us from here in Santa Cruz to Sao Paulo, Brazil tomorrow morning. Any city with a population larger than Australia's should be a genuine blowout. We will try not to get mugged.

Bye-bye Peru

A month is a long time in footy. And a second month in Peru is even longer. Since I last wrote, we have escaped the land of the thief, the liar and the truth-twister and reside at present in the tranquilo city of La Paz, Bolivia. But I won't elaborate on any of our hijinks in Bolivia today as there is plenty to tell of what happened between the descent of Nevado Pisco and our transit to La Paz. Sorry that there are no photos with this post. I've tried many places over the past week that have DVD readers, but have had no joy.

We had a beer with Mark in Huaraz just before he jumped on a bus to meet with a mate in Lima. We were in a good state of mind after out hikes in the Cordillera Blanca and were in no mood to deal with a teeming city of 8 million, so we caught a bus more or less straight to Ica and spent only two hours in Lima in the hours just prior to sunrise. Ica was nothing to speak of, another dry and featureless city on the central coastal plain of Peru, but the oasis at Huacachina looked in the flesh the same way it does on the back of a 50 sole note. The only oasis in Peru, Huacachina is surrounded by a sea of sand that looks similar in my mind's eye to the Sahara desert. All the tourists who pass through here (and there are many) do so to take a dune buggy trip out into the dunes, try a little sandboarding and drink heaps of booze at the few bars around the lake. We spent three days there and felt very much like Bill Murray did in Groundhog Day. It was good to move along.

We did take a short trip to the Paracas National Park which is a 35 minute speedboat ride out into the Pacific. A variety of birds, sealions and crustacea inhabit these islands that make up Paracas, and we saw them all. We also visited what was an interesting precursor to the Nazca Lines, a giant candelabra imprinted on the side of a hill. Naturally, modern science has no clue as to how or when it was made or by whom. But crusty sea pirates, fishermen and the like have been blowing out to it for centuries. At around 170m high, it was impressive.

Nazca is the capital town of the driest are in Peru. Rain comes to Nazca and its surrounds once every decade. If you look good in brown, this is the place for you. Similar to Huacachina, the tourists come to Nazca for one thing: To catch a morning light-plane flight over the Nazca lines. This we did and we saw all of the main lines as instructed. However, to call these things 'lines' is to misrepresent what they really are. I've seen pottery from other ancient cultures and also from the Nazca, but to see these intricate designs blown up to a size that only allows them to be viewed from 400m in the air is rather impressive. Commercial flights started crossing the Nazca plain in the early 1950's and you could imagine the surprise of those first pilots as they crossed the figure of the monkey or the hummingbird, the whale or the spaceman. Our photos were quite crap, and we should have bought the postcard set.

A note to all of you planning to take the flight as we did - Don't eat breakfast before you go up. It makes concentration on the lines harder than it should be.

Next stop was Arequipa. This town, like EVERY other one in Peru has a main square called Plaza de Armas. Back in the day these squares were typically surrounded by the governmental buildings and a military armoury, hence the adoption of the name Armas. Anyway, the Plaza in Arequipa is beautiful, the best in all of Peru in my opinion. I did not however take a photo of this plaza because I'm stupid.

From Arequipa we took a few days to hike in and out of the Canon de Colca (Colca Canyon), the world's second deepest at 3,126m. Mike had strongly suggested that we go further afield and hike the deepest (by an additional 161m), the Canon de Cotahuasi, but we were lazy and opted for the road more travelled.

Having travelled in India some years ago, I thought that public transport could not possibly be as crowded as it was on local trains in Kolkata. I was wrong. On the six hour journey from Arequipa to Cabanaconde, the Peruvians squeezed nearly 120 people onto a 48 seater bus. It was a fucking joke. Descending a moutain pass of 4,840m with that much extra weight cannot possibly be safe and I had a low, gnawing sense of doom for the majority of the bus ride.

We hiked down the canyon wall, stayed a night in comparitively salubrious accommodations on the canyon floor, met some cool Danish folks, hiked along the floor some more the next day, took a dip in some nice pools and hiked back up that afternoon. During the ascent, we were lucky enough to see four male Condors at very close quarters. The largest bird in the world is impressive when it flies very close overhead.

The following morning, waiting for the bus, Amy spotted someone she used to work with at the Indooroopilly Pig 'n' Whistle about seven years ago. Small world. We all stopped at the Cruz del Condor to, you guessed it, spot Condors, and talked about all sorts of stuff and agreed to drink beer in Arequipa the next day. As it happens, the Condors we did see were a very long way distant and instead I got a shot of the tourists scrambling to see these birds. We'd already seen them the day before as I said, so we left on the earliest bus we could back to Arequipa. We met with Anna and Mike as planned and drank an awful lot of beer in the lovely afternoon sun.

The 'classic' Inca Trail to Machu Picchu is booked out for three or four months ahead, so if you want to hike this trail you need to nominate a date before you leave, pay the money and turn up in Cusco in time to start the hike. With such a flexible itinerary, we did not want to nominate a date as it may have meant that we would have to skip places of interest to make the trek. Besides, it is bloody expensive to hike the classic trail, and we were sure we could save a few bucks by turning up and taking one of the alternative routes.

We had heard a great deal about the Salkantay route to Machu Picchu. It was over twice as long as the classic route (75km instead of 30km), has less people on the trail, goes over a higher pass (4,850m instead of 4,200m) and has two gigantic mountains to view for a few days, Humantay at 5,917m and Salkantay itself at 6,271m. After our efforts in Huaraz we thought that these statistics added up to a more challenging trek, so off we went.

Of course, because all tour operators in Cusco are pathological liars, very little of what they promised us or any of the other 11 people in our party was actually true. Sure if you bent the truth and viewed it from their skewed angle, some of it was kinda true, but mostly we were all sold a pack of lies. Rather than delve into specifics here, let me summarise it by saying that the trek, the guide, the helpers and the overall ambience of the trip was crap. We did however meet a bunch of top people. I guess you'd rather have met good people and shared an ordinary experience with them than have had the best trekking conditions with a pack of assholes.

Machu Picchu itself was an impressive site and I believe it has been voted as one of the New Seven Wonders by anyone who has access to the internet. Around 90 million people voted which is a far more representative sample than the one guy who decided the original seven wonders all those years ago.

Getting out of Cusco was more challenging than it ought have been. People resident in the triangular area between the towns of Puno, Cusco and Arequipa had decided to strike or blockade the roads between these towns to protest against poor social conditions. I have no idea of the specific reason behind these blockades, and neither do the Peruvians or Bolivians we've spoken to. We bought a bus ticket to La Paz via Puno on the assurance that the bus would take an alternative route. When the bus pulled up at 4:00am in sub-zero temperatures at who-knows-where and the driver told us we would have the start walking, I couldn't say I was surprised. Luckily, we stayed on the bus for a while and we drove for another hour. There were indeed physical blockades and at about 7:00am we started walking.

By the time we made it to La Paz our 12 hour direct journey on one bus had turned into 18 hours by way of one bus, one stint on foot, two minivans complete with spewing small children, and two taxis for the final 350km of the journey. Initially I was pissed off, but it actually became kinda fun. We were happiest when we received our stamps from the stern Bolivian border guards. We had ben in Peru for 49 days. That's seven whole weeks. I would say that the scenery in Peru got a grade of A. The people unfortunately got a big old F.

We have a lot of things coming up in Bolivia, with one completed yesterday and the next starting tomorrow, and we plan to get out of the mountains on around July 24 when we'll fly to Sao Paulo, Brazil. We have high hopes for Brazil and rely on Jo and Nadine's assurance that Brazil is all that we hope for and more.