roganjosh

After all the excitement of rushing through Peru I took some time to hang around in La Paz and recover for a week or so, which gave me plenty of time to realise that La Paz is a really odd place! For a start it´s the highest capital city in the world, but built in a valley, which I wasn´t expecting. It doesn´t really have much in the way of large shops, but it makes up for this by having everything for sale on the streets. I saw men hawking overcoats and parasols, merchandise slung over their shoulders. I saw a guy selling two sizes of hula hoop, just walking along the street looking for customers. You can even buy dried llama foetuses to bury under your house for good luck. The city is full of shoe shine boys who walk around hassling you if your shoes aren´t shiny enough, and they all wear balaclavas. Old Bolivian ladies in traditional dress push wheelbarrows full of enormous popped corn around the steep streets, selling it by the bag. People dressed as zebras patrol the traffic lights to help people across the street. Every bank has an armed guard, and I´m not talking about batons and hand guns – you have to walk past someone toting at least a shotgun before you can talk to your bank manager. clerical types set up desks on the street with typewriters and fill in official documents for people. And strange as all of these things are the thing I found most interesting was that they had absolutely nothing to do with tourists! This is just how life in Bolivia goes on. Sure there are loads of tourists in La Paz, but apart from the tour operators that line the streets in some areas the city seems oblivious to all the foreigners.

So I spent most of my time in La Paz just wandering around, drinking coffee, relaxing, but when I heard about Cholitas Luchadoras I had to check it out. A Cholita is the traditional Bolivian woman, dressed in petticoats and a bowler hat, normally seen carrying a huge pack on her back, or pushing a wheelbarrow full of popped corn. Luchadoras are fighters, or in this case, wrestlers, in the best pantomime, staged fights tradition. Put the two together and you get tiny Bolivian women getting into the wring with masked, male Bolivian wrestlers. The fights happen on a Sunday in El Alto, the city built above the valley that La Paz is in, and the crowd is a mix of curious tourists in the front row seats and locals, bringing their kids along to boo and hiss the rudos (bad guys), and cheer the tecnicos (good guys). Most of the fights were just between guys, which were entertaining enough, but not what we came to see. One of those fights did produce the spectacle of Spiderman being set on fire, and having to run out of the stadium (shed). When the first Cholita vs. guy fight happened the woman took a hell of a beating! At one point the wrestler took off his belt and started whipping her with it – but he got his comeupance when she started throwing him against the ropes, and even diving onto him once she´d thrown him out of the ring! The final bout was the showpiece, two teams of one boy and one girl each, in a no holds barred epic. The rudo Cholita was La Loca, who didn´t like it when you called her crazy! Thing was, she was pretty crazy. While attacking her Cholita opponent she picked up a huge bottle of coke from the crowd, sprayed it randomly at fighter and audience, before throwing the other woman into the shocked crowd, kicking in the security barriers and starting to hit her with a chair – everyone scrambling to get out of the way! The fight ended with La Loca turning on her partner for letting the other team win, and then storming out of the ring having thrown him to the ground. She was something of a crowd pleaser!

I did eventually make it out of La Paz, but it took running into my Easter Island travel buddy Sarah to do it. She and her sister turned up in La Paz, and just happened to book into the same hostel as me! We decided we´d all head south for a quick tour, so we visited Sucre, Potosi and Uyuni. Sucre was a nice little city, that dinosaurs left their footprints on, or at least nearby, a few million year ago. After taking a look at those, we moved onto Potosi where we bought dynamite and went into the silver mines. The dynamite was a gift for the miners who work there, so we didn´t get to set any off, but we were underground when someone else did in another part of the mountain – the most almighty booms! From Potosi we wrapped up warm and headed for the salt flats at Uyuni. The salt flats are huge, the size of a small country, but so may tourists head out to them now, and head to the same places on them, that it´s hard to find a spot where there isn´t a group of people trying to take trick photographs of each other. Driving back across the flats as the sun set was amazing though, the ground still bright white as the sky darkens above it.

After the tour of the salt flats the girls headed back up to La Paz to climb mountains and then cycle back down them, while I´ve headed further south to Tupiza, which puts me under 3000m for the first time in a while. Somewhere near here is where Butch and Sundance got shot down, and I´d probably head out on a tour, but it seems like a sandstorm has blown into town or something. It´s windy as hell, and the sky is a strange shade of orange! Think maybe I´ll just hang out watching cable TV for a while. Next stop, Argentina!

Peru was an amazing country, full to the brim with wildlife, inca ruins and political turmoil. I´d imagine that tourists in Peru normally only get to see the first two of those things, but towards the end of my time in the country the strikes and protests by the indigenous community became a bit hard to ignore, given that they effectively sealed off the city of Cusco for weeks at a time! Travelling up to Lima there was no hint of any trouble though. Arequipa was a good starting point, with the big tourist attraction (other than all the hiking and trekking that we ignored) being Juanita, the incan ice princess – the preserved remains of a 14 year old girl, sacrificed on the volcano next to the city to appease the gods. The city itself is pretty impressive, though a bit hard to get a handle on, since everything seems to happen in courtyards off the street. Unless you´re constantly peering into doorways you´d think there were no cafes or restaurants around. The convent of Santa Catalina takes up an entire city block, and made a nice break from the constant stream of taxis that fill the roads, and in the evening we checked out Arequipa´s famous nightlife, which seemed to consist of Peruvian guys drinking until they threw up, sometimes on the seat next to them, without being thrown out of the bar!

The next stop was Nazca, home of the famous Nazca lines. Hundreds of geometric and animal shapes drawn in the desert over a 500km square area. Since the big mystery is why the shapes were drawn so they could only really be appreciated from the air you really have to take a flight to see them at their best. Travelling with Steve and Jeff was a bonus here because three is the magic number for filling a small plane. A very small plane. The flight was pretty fun to start with, but after a couple of tight turns over the shapes – the pilot using the wing tip to point them out – I was starting to feel a bit green, and was glad that it was only a half hour long! The animal shapes are very cool though, particularly the monkey and the hummingbird, but the astronaut was probably the most surprising. A huge humanoid drawn on the side of a hill raising his hand to give you a wave. There´s something of the telly-tubby about him (although he´s probably a representation of a shaman, rather than a children´s TV character, or an alien).

I said goodbye to Jeff and Steve in Nazca and carried on up to Paracas, which has the tag of the poor man´s Galapagos because of it´s huge nature reserve. The Islas Balletas are home to the vast numbers of seabirds that keep the guana fertiliser business going. The islands are spectacular to visit by boat, and I was happily snapping away at the hundreds and thousands of storks, humbold penguins, peruvian boobies, cormorants and assorted other local gulls. There´s also a colony of sealions that like to hang out and have their picture taken while they laze in the sun, fight, or hop into the water. The guys working on the guana harvest seemed happy to see us too, but then we did deliver a 5L drum of Pisco for them to get through.

Next stop was Lima where I met up with my buddy Amy who was joining me for a two week holiday. On our first jaunt into the city we came across a parade of dozens of shrines being carried out of the cathedral and paraded around the square, accompanied by dancers, bands, llamas and groups of men wearing white balaclavas embroidered with moustaches and extravagant chins, who would take it in turns to whip each other. Fearing that Lima couldn´t top that we headed for the Amazon rain forest the next day, to Peurto Maldonaldo, where we had a two hour boat ride along the Tambopata river looking out for Cayman and Capybara. The next day we were looking forward to a hike out to see giant otters in a nearby lake but sadly our one full day in the jungle was a bit of a washout, and the trail to the otters would have been too difficult. Even so we managed a couple of jungle treks and saw howler monkeys, capachin monkeys, a tamarin monkey that came down and ate a banana right in front of us, and on the night trek a barred monkey frog, that everyone handled before being told it was slightly toxic, a tarantula, a wolf spider and as many crickets and grasshoppers than I could point my torch at. Personally I was quite pleased to spot a tapir track, because they´re pretty rare, but since someone else staying at the lodge saw some Jaguars I guess they win. We also saw plenty of mosquitos, or at least saw the evidence of them afterwards.

After the jungle we flew to Cusco, the ancient capital of the Incas and modern capital of the tourist, where we missed out on seeing Inti Raymi (A reenactment of an old incan festival) but we did get to meet up with Steve and Jeff again and give Michael Jackson a decent send off by dancing the night away in Africa Mama´s. Unfortunately myself and Amy had to get up first thing the next day for a bus journey over twisty turny mountain roads to reach Aqua Calientes, the very commercialised village at the foot of Machu Picchu.

It´s just as well that Machu Picchu is absolutely stunning, because the two hours it took me and Amy to walk up to it was horrific. We set off in the darkness at 4:30am and reached the first set of inca steps along with the other early hikers. By the second set of inca steps I was gasping for breath, and found it hard to believe that everyone else was going to spend another hour walking up them. Missing the start of the third steps Amy and myself decided we´d just walk up the road instead, which is less steep, but much, much further. The view of the surrounding mountains was beautiful as daylight started to break and clouds cleared from around the peaks. After another hour or so of walking, and as the bus loads of tourists coming up from the valley started to overtake us, we got our first view of Machu Picchu hanging across the top of a mountain ridge, underneath the peak of Waynu Picchu. The terraces grow out of the surrounding jungle, some of them still left uncleared, and as you get higher into the site you start to reach the houses, temples and schools that the Incans constructed. The stonework, particularly on the temples, is incredible, with giant blocks of stone cut and placed together with absolute precision. Wandering around the place, with llamas grazing the grass on the terraces and out of breath tourists rushing around to get their photos was loads of fun.

After all that excitement we went back to Cusco and discovered that the roadblocks that had been setup around the city and briefly lifted would be back in place just when we wanted to leave! It´s easy to be oblivious to local news about a place you´re travelling in, but the last couple of weeks in Peru have seen dozens of protesters and police killed, and the resignation of the Prime Minister! Most of this has taken place far away from the tourist destinations, but Cusco is the capital of the indigenous people, and there are a number of issues that they´re trying to battle the government over. Since Amy had a flight home to catch we decided that we´d fly out of Cusco to Juliaca and then get a taxi to Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, but not before we took a paragliding trip over the sacred valley of the Incas! I really enjoyed it, but it might not have been the best way for Amy to try and cure her fear of heights.

The big draw in Puno is the floating islands of the Uros – artifical islands made from reeds where hundreds of indigenous people live. The boat trip we took out the them was pretty commercialised but the islands are still impressive. Much larger than I was expecting, and capable of supporting houses – even restaurants! As the sun went down it was bitterly cold out on the lake, and it´s hard to believe that people still choose to live out there in huts made from reeds. At least the extra tourist money has bought them solar chargers and televisions to pass the evenings though.

That was out last stop in Peru, and after a couple of evenings relaxing in Copacabana on the Bolivian side of the lake Amy and myself made for La Paz where she flew home in a roundabout fashion. I´m taking it easy in La Paz for a couple of days, but at this altitude rushing around isn´t really an option! Not sure where I´m going to head to next in Bolivia, but I´m tempted to try and follow Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid´s route – I figure those guys must have had some fun!