Lake Titicaca

Continuing from last entry...

So we arrived in La Paz at 7am. It seemed like a pretty incredible city, built like a spiral bowl, with the bottom around 600m lower than the top, and the mountains all around it, really making it look like a bowl.

However, we only stayed for a couple of hours, in the bus terminal, waiting for the next bus that would take us to Copacabana (nope, not the beach in Rio), a city on the shores of lake Titicaca.

Apparently I must've been really tired (after the journey from hell!) because I fell asleep almost immediately, and when I woke up, we were already in the highlands surrounding the lake.

It's quite a sight to wake up and see the beautiful blue skies and the beautiful dark blue waters and mountains and rolling hills all around...


(view from the window of the bus when I woke up... and the broken window with the cumpliments of Mene, who broke it trying to open... oops! )

Funny thing is though, there's a part of the lake where there's no road around, so our bus actually got on a boat, and we had to get on a different boat and chase after it! :) It was kinda funny because nobody explained anything to us, they just told us to get off the bus, and we watched and marvelled as the bus started to cross the lake without us...




Once on the other side, our journey continued for another hour or so, until we arrived in the beautiful Copacabana. We were tired, hungry and very dirty, so all we wanted was a room, a shower, and some good food...

We found a place called Residencial Sucre, with a nice room and hot shower for a reasonable price, and took it immediately. After the necessary showers, we went to find money exchange, food and laundry (which was also incredibly necessary!).



That's my happy face after a nice, HUGE and delicious Rainbow Trout, fished directly from the lake, and so fresh, it must've been fished a couple of hours before I ate it... :)

After food, a nap... that ended up lasting until the next morning, when unfortunately we had the bus to go to Puno, already in Peru. I say unfortunately because Copacabana is really beautiful, and I would've liked to stay a little longer, but Peru awaits!! :)

The Journey to La Paz

I realize I haven't updated this in a little while, and I should try to keep up to date more, and have to upload a million pictures, but I only have a little bit of time and I think the journey from Uyuni to La Paz deserves an entry all of itself... (even though there are other memorable bus rides that will be mentioned later...)

So like I mentioned in the end of the last entry, we arrived at Uyuni and had to wait until 8pm for the bus. Like idiots, we didn't wait until all the agencies were opened (it was like 12:30 when we arrived, and the majority would reopen at 2pm), we just bought our tickets in the first one we found, for 80 bolivianos, which seemed like a reasonable price, even though it meant we'd have to change buses in Oruro, at the ungodly hour of 3am... but alright, we really just wanted to get the hell out of there.

Time comes for the bus, and our Canadian friends from the Salar tour were actually coming part of the journey with us, only until Oruro, where they would take another bus to Cochabamba. They only paid 40 bolivianos (which is important info, will tell you why in a sec.)

The journey begins, and we immediately feel like we've been trapped inside an earthquake simulator, or something of the sort. No joke. The road was the worse thing I've seen so far, and the entire bus (which wasn't that new) was rattling and shaking like a blender... To make matters worse, there wasn't just the number of people that could fill the seats... there was much more! You know those buses you see in movies, with the chickens and the children and everything else mixed in?? Well, there were no chickens (or at least that I saw... but I made sure to close my eyes very quickly and ignore everything...) but it was kinda like that... people sitting on the floor, trying to sleep on the floor, filling the isles and every possible space...

Luckly, both Mene and I can sleep through anything, so that's what we did... turn towards the window, away from the crowd, and sleep....

Eventually, we made a stop, somewhere around midnight I think, and woke up, looked behind at our Canadian friends to see how they were doing, and the poor girl, Angie, she had been throwing up out the window nonstop for the last 4hrs or so... and Matt, her husband, could barely keep it down. They couldn't believe we had slept through the whole thing...

After that, we had a paved road, so it was better... until we stopped at 3am in Oruro.

In Oruro, we expect to change buses directly and leave to La Paz, but that's where we discover that we don't actually have tickets to La Paz, that the bus company we came with doesn't go all the way there, and the bus driver was walking around with us behind him, trying to find us tickets. Detail: there were people yelling around the platforms "La Paz, 15 bolivianos to La Paz..."

That's where we realized we'd just been screwed and the bus driver used our 40 bolivianos to buy tickets for 15 bolivianos and give them to us, and put us on the bus. Oh well... it happens...

At least we made it to La Paz, the second bus was on paved road and not overcrowded, and incredibly, it was on time. We arrived at La Paz at 7am on the dot, where we stayed at the bus terminal for only a couple of hours, while waiting for our next bus, which would take us to Copacabana, on Lake Titicaca...

And that's on another entry... :)

Pictures...

Hey peoples...

I have to do the whole post on the Salar tour, and that's going to take a while... so I thought I'd just post a couple of pictures to give you an idea...

Right now I'm in Peru, just crossed the border this morning, after spending a comatose day/night in Copacabana... I slept close to 12hrs... serious!! It was nice to have a big comfortable bed, and not have to have 7 blankets to keep warm... :)

Alright, pictures!



Crossing the border into Bolivia... if you look carefully, there's a Bolivian flag on the background... but we were running so as to catch the train, and the guidebook had said several times "no pictures allowed at border control areas" so we thought it safer to avoid them...



That's Laguna Verde, in the middle of the desert, almost on the border with Chile... altitude? Somewhere around 4100m I think... cold and hard to breathe, but beautiful nonetheless...



Sunrise on the Salt Flats.... it was freaking cold (yep, it was cold during the whole tour!!) but it was really beautiful!!! :)

Alright, that's all for the moment.... I'll get my act together and write about the whole tour day-by-day before I have too much more to write and it gets hard to catch up... Tomorrow we're already going on another 2-day tour, to some islands on Lake Titicaca... :)

Spur-of-the moment...

So I don't need to remind you people that I'm crazy, but I thought I'd start with that anyway... :)

I have a friend from Greece who had been living in Buenos Aires for like a year and a half, but recently went back to Greece for a month and was passing through Buenos Aires again just to catch a bus because he's going to travel through South America and stay in Colombia for a couple of months...

Well, he was only going to be in town for a day, so we met Monday night just to catch up a bit, before he left at 10am Tuesday morning. We started to talk, and eventually, without me knowing exactly how it happened, I was on board to go on the trip with him, at least until I ran out of money... Keep in mind that this is Monday at like 11pm, and the bus leaves at 10am the next day. So I go home, start calling people, start packing, write a letter to my roommates and leave rent for the next month, and try to sleep (although that didn't work very well).

Next morning, 8am I'm out the door, because I still have to try to change money and buy a ticket... to the bus that will take me from Buenos Aires to the town of La Quiaca, on the border with Bolivia, some 29hrs later. No joke.

When I actually get in the bus, his jaw dropped... he just couldn't believe that I was really there. I was. I'm just that crazy... :) and translation is great because it's an online based job, you can do it from anywhere... so it´s all good.

Here I am, 6 days later, after just finishing a tour of the Salar de Uyuni. I'll have to write about that on the next blog, especially because I just realized that I forgot my little journal thing at the last hotel... a salt hotel... meaning, a building completely made of salt bricks... unbelievable!! Pictures later...

Anyway, we're here in Uyuni until tonight, where we take an overnight bus to La Paz, and from there try to get on another bus to Copacabana... nope, not the beach in Rio... it's actually a little town on the shores of Lake Titicaca... and after that, it's all up in the air.

So to sum it all up, I'm crazy, but it's always been a bit embarassing that I've travelled all over and haven't seen much of my own back yard (meaning South America). This was a crazy decision, one that I didn't really think over, even because I didn't have much time, but sometimes opportunities knock and you just have to grab them! That's what I did, and so far, it couldn't have been any better... :)


Yes, I'm crazy... but you already knew that...

So stay tuned for the next episodes of crazy South American trip!