Copacabana - On a Very Short Shoestring

Copacabana....hmmmm, sounds like a resort where you lie in hammocks, swim and drink coctails all day. It is actually a small town on Lake Titicaca, close to the Peruvian/Bolivian border. Yes, that´s right we have arrived in Bolivia and you are probably over half way through reading this blog. YAY FINALLY!!

We came through the border with no problems, except for the really stinky french boys sitting behind us on the bus. It is a bit of a problem for Americans to come here these days though, as the bolivian government has decided to put Americans through the same process that Bolivians have to go through to enter the states. Good on them I say!

One of the biggest surprises in crossing a land border is that things are actually different on the other side, even though it´s only separated by an imaginary line. One of the biggest differences we noticed was the sheer number of hippies in Copacabana, selling handmade bracelets in the street, loitering around with their long dreadlocks and cranking out Bob Marley. It seems this place is some sort of hippy centre of South America.

Copacabana is basically one main tourist street, although I do believe that Bolivians actually live there. Tourists go there to visit the islands on lake Titicaca, Isla del Sola and Isla de la Luna.

Wilson and I, instead of taking the boat direct to Isla del Sol from Copacabana, hike 17km to a small town on the peninsula. Upon reaching the town we were asked by a small girl if we would take her picture. Assuming that she wanted to see a picture of herself, I oblidged. Then she says, "Plata?" ("Money?"). Her friends all laughed.....and so did we. They train them young these days!

We were offered 2 options for getting to the Island from the peninsula:

1. 80 bolivianos for a motor boat or...

2. 20 bolivianos each for an old bolivian man to row us there.

Obviously, we chose option 2. Luckily the man had a big wad of coca in his cheek for energy and he was quite pleased when we gave him an extra 10 bolivianos as he dropped us off on a random rock on the island. The other upside of this covert sneaking onto the island was that we avoided the ticket office at the main tourist wharf and hence avoided being cajoled into buying an unneccesary tourist ticket! The reason for our overt cheapness at this point in the trip was the lack of an ATM in Copacabana, hence we only had the left over Peruvian Soles that we had converted at the border to see us through until La Paz.

We quickly discovered shortly after our arrival that, in line with most other Bolivian tourist facilities, all the hostels on the island were fairly much the same and offering fairly much the same food for the same prices in their restaurants, which they all had. We found a nice one with views of the lake, which they all had as we were on an island....

The next day we set off to the northern part of the island which promised such artefacts as an old incan temple and the rock of the puma, which boasts the origin of the incan creation legend. The walk along the ridge of the island was very tranquil with cracking views and very few other people. We looked down on the clear waters and bobbing boats of the little bays and enjoyed fresh breeze coming in from the lake. When we arrived at the ruins we found that it had been overrun by dirty hippies. As we were informed by a "guide", that Wilson foolishly thought might actually know something historical about the site, about the mystical energies of the stone, we saw that his associate in hippyness, had seen fit to spread his "trinkets for sale" all over the sacrificial stone. We were told that he was entitled to do this as he had "great knowledge". The temple ruins were somewhat dissapointing as well with the best part being the lakefront views...

We shot back to the mainland in the afternoon and struggled up the hill overlooking Copacabana, past the pilgrimatic stations of the cross, to watch the sunset dipping into the lake.

The next day we jumped in a van bound for La Paz, which involved a little ferry ride across the lake (they shuttle busses across on tiny barges dragging through the water). Little did we realise what was waiting for us in La Paz.....

The Tardis Bus

We arrived in Arequipa at 8 in the morning from the most horrible night bus journey to date (I guess that´s what you get when you´re stingy and take the cheapest chicken bus). None of the windows seemed to seal, and being a desert at over 3000m the wind on the bus was freezing!! Even with my down jacket! Needless to say, we didn´t arrive well rested. Coincidentally again, Theresa (the proud owner of Tessa´s hammock) was on James´s bus.

We didn´t waste much time in Arequipa, as our Peruvian visa was about to expire, and we set off for Cabanaconde and the Colca Canyon the next day with our Brittishy mate James (some of us quite hung over at this stage thanks to James and a random Peruvian named Marco Antonio who wanted to practice his english on us all night!!). We arrived late and found a sweet deal at a hotel, with the best shower I´ve had since my arrival on this continent (hot and with plenty of water!). N.B. This shower has been equaled in quality since (this morning actually).

The plan was to spend a few days hiking in the Canyon, which once claimed to be the deepest in the world, but has since been surpassed by some other canyon in Peru. The canyon is also famous for the Andean Condors, which boast a wing span of up to 3 metres. There are no roads into the canyon, but it is dotted with little traditional towns.

The first day we hiked for about 5 hours down into the canyon and along to this town called Malata. On arrival it seemed as though no one lived in this town, but eventually we came across the hostel (a windowless mud brick building with bamboo beds). Surprisingly we were the only tourists there, until some spanish campers arrived a bit later on. The woman who owned the hostal made us a great dinner and brekkie the next day. Her husband helped me out by nailing the sole back onto my tramping boot, as it had almost completely fallen off at this stage. He also gave me some sound advice, to please purchase some new boots as soon as I get out of the canyon!!

The next day we hiked to the other end of the canyon and then back, in the desert heat of the day, after deciding that we didn´t want to stay there after all. Coincidentally Theresa had booked a tour for the same days and we ran into her along the trail. It was hard work and we were glad when we arrived at Oasis, where we, and Theresa (coincidentally), were spending the night. Oasis is a ´town´at the bottom of the canyon. It is made up of tourist accommodation and swimming pools. We did have one reward for all our walking and that was seeing andean condors....soo far away that they were just black dots.....but condors none the less.

The next morning we ascended the 1200 metres back to the top of the canyon and it was damned hard work!! Britishy James was keen to get the next bus back to Arequipa and I was a little bit glad when there wasn´t enough space for Will and I ´cos I was STARVING!! Will and I got seats for the next bus and ate lunch.....But I soon wasn´t soo glad about not getting on the first bus....

By the time Will and I got to the bus there was a line across the plaza, people packing on the bus and the bus was already chocka! All these people had come from a neighbouring town for the independence day parade. Slowly, little by little, the line somehow disappeared onto the bus..... There were about 10 people still outside the bus door and we were yelling at the driver "We can´t fit on, can you please change our tickets for the next bus!?" very exasperated! His response was that we should "Suban!" ("Get on the bus!"). So we got pushed in the doorway with the other 10 people and for the first 10 minutes of our journey the door couldn´t close. A couple of Peruvian men were in danger of becoming road kill. Luckily all these people were not continuing the full 6 hours to Arequipa, but they all got off after about an hour and a half....PHEW!!

We did spent the next few days in Arequipa checking out the city. In comparison to other Peruvian cities we have visited, Arequipa was a really vibrant place, with loads of students and student bars and a centre full of white stone colonial buildings all overlooked by nearby volcanoes. On Sunday, after coincidentally running into Theresa (we weren´t sure who was stalking who at this stage), we walked to a lookout over the city and came across a delicious local treat called Queso Helado (Cheese Ice Cream). There are always plenty of sweet snacks for sale outside the churches on Sundays. We also visited a park in the central town which was crammed with families enjoying the good weather and delicious food. One thing we noticed in Arequipa and everywhere since.... French people everywhere....

As the next day was Peru´s Independence Day, we had fears that our planned trip over the border into Bolivia, a full day before our visas expired, would be thrown into disarray. In fact the whole trip was fairly plain sailing with the only drawback was that we had to stop in Puno for a few hours, complete with it´s open sewers and stinking market. Onward to Bolivia!

Machu Pikachu: The Japanese Anime Version

Hello Blogworld. Yes it´s been a while since the last entry and we´ve got a whole lot to catch up on. The reason for the resounding blogsilence is that we have been on the run, not literally, but we´ve had to get a rush on to get done what we want. Initially this was because our Peru visa was fast running out and now that we are in Bolivia, we´ve realised our whole trip is fast running out!

We left you hanging at our arrival in Cuzco after some painfully long bus ride. Our plan for Cuzco was that we had no plan. We arrived with our friends from burners who, being more organised than us, jumped straight on the trainto Machu Picchu Pueblo. We wanted to spend a few days sussing out other options for getting up to Machu Picchu including hiking in either solo or with a tour. Wandering about looking at options was pretty well all we did in Cuzco which isn´t very exciting so I´ll just describe a bit about Cuzco itself.

Cuzco at first glance is a city dominated by tourists and the tourist trade, and for good reason as it is a beautiful city with narrow, windy cobbled alleys, massive cathedrals towering over a busy plaza, spanishmeetsincan architecture, all nestled high in an andean valley. The upside to being part of the tourist bustle was an abundance of vibrant crafts markets and tasty food (we even found a place which served flat whites). There was also plenty of people around to meet up with. After much fruitless email organising we ran into Cush and Rich (some friends from Wellington) in the street. We also ran into a few other people from earlier in our trip including Theresa, who Tessa hocked her hammock off to after our 3 day boat ride to Tarapoto.

Of course the downside to the touristyness was the constant hawking. Our hostel was located at the top of a street we later learned was known as "Gringo Alley". This meant we couldn´t leave the hostel without a pack of hawkers descending on us offering everything from restaurants and tours to massages and drugs. One guy in particular had it in for me. I´d see him as we walked down the street and as we approached I saw a glint of recognition in his eye and a sly smirk would cross his face. As soon as we were within pouncing distance of his overpriced restaurant, I´d find a menu thrust in my face and a constant babbling in my ear. It seems taking no for answer, no matter how loud and forceful, apparently wasn´t an option, but I reckon he just loved winding me up.

Another wee story from Cuzco happened when we were checking out the arty scuplture area of town with our pals from Pisco. We noticed a group of people and police arguing and as we drew closer one guy jumped up with long pole and whacked one of the cops. The cops got a couple of hits into his arms with their nightsticks before the guy turned and sprinted... straight towards us of course. We got the hell out of the way and the last we saw of him, he was doing a reasonable job of outrunning 5 cops, as you would with the certainty of a decent beating once caught!

The result of our days of planning and researching a route to Machu Picchu brought us in full circle away from doing any sort of trek, to just doing the cheapest option we could find. This involved taking a bus to a random village around the back of Machu Picchu, transfering to a minivan to another wee village, then walking along a train track for 5 hours. One word, mission. At the end of it, tired and thirsty, we made the mistake of going for a beer in the most touristy town in south america. The 4 for 1 deal sounded like a good way to quench the thirst but it turned out that 4 for 1 in Machu Picchu Pueblo means 4 beers for "one price", which happened to be reasonably expensive. Bastards.

The next morning we agreed between us to join the masses in getting up at 5 in the morning to dash up the steep path to the ruins, dashing past a group of 18 year olds on some sort of organised tour, only to reach the top and join a long queue to get into the complex. Once in we dashed across the ruins to beat the masses to queue once again to climb Waynu Picchu (the peak in the background of the classic Machu Picchu photos). We finally actually finished queuing at around 9.30am by which time a little of the mystique of the ruins had faded.









It was all well worth it though once we reached the precariously perched ruins atop Waynu Picchu which overlooked not only the complex of Machu Picchu, but also the path of our trek along the train lines the day before. The top was crammed full of tourists laughing and chatting like so many gannets on a rock.



We spent the rest of the day hiking to various vantage points above the complex and marvelling at the sheer majesty of the place, and also at how much the droves of people looked like worker ants from afar. The ruins themselves are perched high on a saddle surrounded by lush jungle. On either side of the saddle a river winds its way through a deep gorge. the city is a beautiful spectacle and with so many people clamouring everywhere it´s not difficult to imagine, from a distance, what it might have been like as a city in Inca times. I´ve chucked some pictures at the end here because words cant really do justice to the place.

We returned to Cuzco the easy way, on the train and met up with James, Stacy and Jess from burners to check out the markets and to eat delicacies such as Alpaca (it´s a little chewy). After spending another day or so in Cuzco and bidding farewell to Stacy and Jess, we headed on to Arequipa with James for a spot of hiking and a ton of good mexican food.

Whats the Story?

I´ll start off with a quick story that I forgot to tell in the last blog. It involves the night of the 4th of July, which for the largely US contingent of the burners was a big enough deal for them to travel to the next town to buy sketchy homemade fireworks for an extortionate price. We had a wee shin dig to watch the fireworks and generally wonder why everyone was feeling so patriotic. The british contingent meanwhile had hatched a nasty plot and, while the americans launched into their national anthem and got teary eyed watching the peruvian made explosions, down from the roof came a hail of english eggs, launched by men in red plastic coats. While chaos ensued below, one of the english guys, by the name of Gareth, got too caught up in the moment and stepped off the roof. The only thing that saved him from the 3m drop to concrete below was shoddy peruvian construction. His jeans caught on some exposed reinforcing steel sticking out of the wall. The rest of the night was full of rivalry between both parties, while the rest of us tried to keep out of the way.

Now on with the rest.....

The little town of Huacachina (Wakacheena) has become the get away destination for pisqueñan volunteers. When the piles of rubble in the street become too depressing, you´ve spent way too much money on chocolate from the little shop down the road and you´ll lose you´re sense of taste if you see another meal consisting solely of 3 different carbs, this is when the photogenic wee oasis in the middle of the desert starts to beckon. We were joined in Huacachina on the weekend by about 80% of the Pisco volunteers which meant we pretty much dominated the town for the whole weekend...

OK so here´s the formula that Huacachina, a town consisting almost entirely of hostels, restaurants, tour agencies and a lagoon, has worked out for itself: You roll into town for the weekend, stay at one of the many hostels, go for a rollercoasterish dune buggy ride through the dramatic desert dunes, go hurtling down said desert dunes on makeshift sandboards, and relax by the pool with a Pisco Sour in your hand. It´s not what I would call a genuine peruvian experience but it is a lot of fun.

The dune buggy ride took us speeding up out of the basin of the oasis, racing other buggies up the steep dunes and throwing us against our seatbelts on sharp turns. It was here that we came to appreciate the desert we were in which rolled with magnificence as far as the eye could see. After some more high speed hooning we parked abruptly facing downhill like a parallel park in Mount Vic. This was to be our first sandboarding slope. I´d like to give you a comparison with snowboarding s the boarders out there will know just what its like but I´ve never snowboarded so you´re out of luck! I quickly decided though that turning on the sand was going to be too slow and difficult so I developed my style of gunning it straight down as fast as possible. This worked pretty well for me to start with as I would normally crash out before I got too fast.

On our last day in Huacachina we hired sandboards and hiked up the steep towering dune that separates the town from neighbouring Ica. We warmed up on a gentle slope and admired the sweeping view before we commited to the task at hand. We had a pretty die hard sandboarding crew of about half a dozen, some of whom had even sandboarded prior to this weekend. Unfortunately on my second run down this slope I had gotten skilled enough to stay on my feet long enough to gather up some good speed. The next thing I know, I plough into the ground face first, bending my glasses, while my sandboard flies over and hits me in the head! Sweet crash and I came away unhurt and very slowly scooted my way to the bottom of the dune. I learnt a few days later that the most common sandboarding injury is a torn sphincter.... I count myself lucky.

The rest of the weekend was mostly spent at a place called the Bamboo Hut run by the culinarily gifted Beth. This was the favoured haunt of the burners as Beth made a great thai curry, a killer chocolate brownie, and let us drink BYO without charging us a thing. We had a huge night on Saturday culminating in a mission to a disco in nearby Ica, Tessa was seen busting pretty much every possible shape on the D-floor.

We said goodbye to most of the burners in Huacachina and continued on to Cuzco on a scenic but long bus ride with James (England), Stacy (US) and Jess (US), some of our fellow burners who were also jumping ship. We´re back to travelling and right in the heart of "tourist Peru"!

Tour of a Disaster Zone: Courtesy of "Burners Without Borders"

Well like it or not, I´m back in control of the blog. Bwahaha. Hope everyone in out there is doing good. Rather than swanning about the place we´ve spent the last couple of weeks doing something a bit different and very worthwhile.

While we were in Quito we decided we would like to do some volunteer work somewhere in South America. Its difficult to pin down our exact motivation for this.... somewhere between wanting to help a worthy cause and wanting a different and more direct experience with people here. After doing a quick google search on volunteer opportunities we discovered that finding a worthy cause would be harder than we thought. Volunteer tourism is a booming industry here in south america, the idea being that you (or more normally mummy and daddy) fork out large piles of cash to some agency to plonk you somewhere nice and sheltered to plant trees or hunt for non existent bears or just generally muck around doing nothing. The most extreme example I have heard of this was a group of 18 year old english girls who sadly died in a bus crash after shelling out 10,000 pounds for a 10 week program! Don´t think that any of that cash is finding its way to local communities!

We cottoned on to an outfit called Burners without Borders who are working here in Pisco helping to rebuild after the 8.0 earthquake that hit in August last year. All they asked for is our time and a few dollars for room and board so we figured we were on to the real deal. We worked in Pisco for two weeks; Tessa worked mainly on the "shitter" project which involves building small seismically strengthened toilet blocks, providing sanitation and seismic protection to new houses; and I worked on a new school building in a slum area that popped up after the earthquake. The work is generally pretty much grunt labour as we don´t really have much in the way of high end tools or services on site. We mostly mixed concrete by hand and dug foundation trenches out with spades and picks. The other day we had to stop work as a flock of goats were herded through our construction site! Tessa was called in to provide structural engineering advice for the shitters but strangley enough no-one approached me for advice on providing low energy ventilation solutions....

Working with the burners was pretty inspirational. The group have put in a lot of hard work, their best ideas and months of their lives in order to build projects to help the community here in Pisco. They have been a great bunch of people to work with. It has certainly opened my eyes to just how difficult it is to rebuild from scratch after a disaster when, even months afterwards, there are few basic services such as power and running water. The other day we spent all day carrying buckets of water from a nearby well to a storage tank for mixing a large batch of concrete in the coming days.

So, whats Pisco like now? Well its a smelly, dirty mess. The streets are still piled with rubble and riddled with holes, there is rubbish pretty much everywhere especially heaped on any vacant land and there are areas of shanty towns where displaced people have been living in makeshift bamboo and tarpaulin houses. The picture to the left is of Nuevo Horizonte, a suburb which was established last August for people who had lost everything in the quake. The bamboo "structures" form their houses and they share water taps and portaloo style toilets in the streets. Crime in such areas is obviously pretty rampant and I don´t recall seeing a single police officer during my time in Pisco. There is heaps of building going on, from the massive school going up over the road to individual people trying to fix their cracked walls and roofs. The net café near the burner house currently has a huge crack in the floor. There are still scores of red cross tents which people are living in, even in the middle of town.

Despite our hopes of interacting more directly with locals, we tended to move around in large groups of gringos, heading in to do our work then going back to our casa at the end of the day. Although we did play a few games of football with some of the local kids on our days off.

Since the earthquake, people are poorer and more desperate and there have previously been a few incidents of muggings of volunteers. Due to this there are areas, such as the beach and the local disco that are off limits. This all gave a somewhat confined feeling to being in Pisco. We worked in our groups, lived and ate with the other volunteers in the house and stayed within certain areas of town. We lived in very close quarters in the dorm rooms at the house but through all this we´ve met some pretty cool people.

On the weekend almost 80% of the burners crew headed out to the small resort town of Huacachina for a bit of R&R. That´ll have to be the next blog I reckon.