My people

Santiago :: Chile

So after a little over 6 months it's time to leave Sudamerica and rejoin The Real World.

Places: Santiago.

Coolest thing I did: Watched Chile beat Bolivia 2-0 in a qualifying game from the next World Cup. Not that I care that much but a bar full of people that happy can't help but make you forget the woes of the world.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: When you watch basketball in Spanish a 3-pointer is called a triple (trip-leh). The NBA playoffs are on TV here.

In one of these entries a while back in speculated that South America might have become my favourite part of the world to travel in and having had time to sit at the feet of a giant statue of the Virgin Mary and stare out oer Santiago de Chile and reflect I have to say that's no longer in doubt. Even though this is a continent where all the countries share a fairly common history & the people speak only two different main languages (I'm not arguing with any more know-it-all Americans about whether Quechua is a main language...) the countries and their people are so varied even the famously fragmented Europe seems a bit homogeneous in comparison. From the white sands of Colombia's Caribbean beaches to the icy winds of the Beagle Channel there have been so many highlights it's hard to even start working out what the best were. I know most of you will ask me what the highlight was, so don't been too offended when I give the standard answer "different places were the best for different reasons". It's so much easier here - you just always say the place you're in right at that moment is the best place and how much the people were dicks in any country bordering the one you're in. Actually, maybe it is like Europe...

So as promised I've spent my last weekend on this continent doing pretty much nothing touristy and instead wandering around, sitting in cafes/bars drinking coffee/beer and thinking about the trip, and trying hard not to think about the task of getting another job and house to live in. It was probably better I ended up somewhere familiar to decompress a bit, but I had forgotten Santiago was the first city I came to on this trip and I now know it feels like a much blander little sibling of Buenos Aires (though it would be madness to say that out loud here). What I've decided is that if I'm really honest about it the thing that has made this trip has been the wonderful bunch of strangers I've met and befriended over the last 6 months, most of whom I'll lose contact with because of my continuing refusal to join Facebook. You'll see.

From James of Perth, who I met on the first day (as he was on my flight and staying in the same first hostel), to Caryn (Americans spell Karen funny I guess) and the three Canadians who I spent my last days in the desert with I've met so many people in between to share different experiences and sections of the trip. Each and every one of these temporary allies and friends are true backpacker scum to the fullest, and despite cheap flights, ever improving luggage with wheels and the corporate franchising of hostels it warms my heart to see people still spending their younger years slinging a pair of backpacks over their shoulders and haggling with poor people over 15 cents worth of taxi ride. Sometime back in the 90s someone noticed the rise of ultra cheap, large scale DIY travel and coined the term Lonely Planet Generation, and even though hostelworld.com and friends are taking away some of The Bible's thunder the label still feels right. The same spirit that led people away from package holidays and resorts in the first place is not only still alive, but is honestly getting stronger.

Looking back now I admit one of my biggest worries coming on this trip was the fact I'd have to go back to dorms and the like in the most expensive countries and the kids would shun me due to the fact I'm still backpacking the world with an age that starts with a '3'. With hindsight this was silly. While the bulk of the budget travellers are still clueless 21 year olds (ah, those were the days...) there are enough of the rest of us, those that resisted the standard life path of marriage, crippling debt & kids long enough to keep doing this a little while longer. You tend to find each other, and the conversations are almost always far more interesting. I love the drop-outs, the early divorcees, those on a 'career break', the honeymooners who thought a month in dorms was a better use of money than a weekend in a suite, the eternal bachelors, the 30 something old-maids who got sick of listening to their friends talk about their babies' poo, the miners on their 4 weeks off, the North Americans brave enough to eschew a career, I love them all. Most people who don't quite make it into the standard life path seem to sit at home and get depressed about it, it's the ones out here that think "the hell with that" and instead decide to go and spend some time and money on having some of the best experiences of their lives. That's what this is all about.

Don't get me wrong, some of the people I admire most in the world have stable careers, loving spouses or significant others, wonderful kids & mortgages with so many zeroes I gasp so hard I let out a little bit of wee but that's not all where I am in my own life so it's not always easy to relate.

I know there are people out there, usually the ones that volunteered, did a home-stay or spent a month in one place learning Spanish who will tell you the highlight of their trip was "getting to know the locals". While many might call me cynical (gasp! I hear...) I kind of think that's bollocks. While you can kind of meet and greet with the locals, and it's always nice to get to know them a little better if you keep talking to the same ones for a longer period of time, at the end of the day you aren't really going to understand them, and not just because you're native language probably isn't Spanish or Portuguese. Nearly everyone you meet out here is going to be poorer than you, have had a much harder life and probably holds a little bit of resentment towards your luck of being born in the West, even if they don't show it. The people in many of the countries here are warm and friendly, but that happens with the novelty of people coming from other parts of the world to visit.

However, that doesn't matter all that much because you'll be spending most of your time talking to other tourists or backpackers (I refuse to use the term "traveller" any more as I've gotten sick of the self importance of people who apply it to themselves) and quite often sharing an experience that is new for both or all of you. The amount of times I've heard someone blather on about how they hate spending all their time with other travellers (with no obvious sense of irony) and just thought "bullshit". We stay in hostels full of Westerners, talk in our own language (or English) and have that same discussion about where everyone is going and where they've been that everyone claims to hate because we're all on the other side of the world and we all need a bit of familiarity when everything around you is so strange. I've stopped thinking that's something to be avoided and started thinking that's something to be embraced. While you should take any opportunity to try and converse with someone who lives in the country (and even befriend them) with both hands the reality is the kinds of people you find who have the courage to leave their own country and go somewhere else with no planning and very little money are the kinds of people you should be happy to spend some time with. They can't help but be a little bit interesting, even if they all speak English.

Like all of them though, you also know you aren't like the hippies who drove Kombi vans from Germany to Afghanistan in the 60s and seriously thought they were dropping out of square society forever. We know we're all going to have to go back to The Real World and do things like earn money, quite often to fund the next bout of travel (it's a bit like crack, really, only you're less likely to lose all your teeth). You know that when you get back most people will ask about your trip and you generally only have like 3 mins to talk to them about 6 months and then it's back to what they're been doing. However you do meet the other backpacker tragics out there in The Real World too, you tend to smell it on them. Well that and they also tend to be the people who wear North Face fleeces into the office.

So tomorrow I'm back on a plane - 14 and a bit hours in one sitting due to the fact Qantas have added their own planes to the route since I got here and don't stop in New Zealand on the way. Part of me is already planning to come back and fill in some of the gaps of places I managed to not see here this time. Why is it that travel can only beget more travel?

(as a side note for some reason it really annoys me that the spell checker in Google Chrome doesn't think "beget" is a word...)

Blank Canvas

Calama :: Chile

If Salvador Dali’s mind was a place, this would be it.

Places: Uyuni, Salar de Uyuni, Southwest Loop, San Pedro de Atacama & Calama.

Coolest thing I did: Took lots of silly and inappropriate photos on the salt flats as you can only really do on a surface where perspective is non-existent.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Andean people had their own set of constellations (aside from the Greek Zodiac) which were based on the dark spaces between the stars rather than on the stars themselves. The celestial llama does actually look a bit like a llama.

The country between Potosi and Uyuni in Bolivia starts to resemble Northern Argentina very quickly once you’ve left town, reminding you just how close the borders of all 4 countries (along with Chile and Peru) are together. At the still torn up end of the rapidly improving road (the Lonely Planet predicted 6 hours but due to brand new asphalt the trip is now down to 4 and a half hours and shrinking) lies the frontier town of Uyuni, the last stop inside Bolivia before Chile and a place totally geared up for one thing – to allow tourists to go and look at the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s biggest salt flats (or as I saw it spelled in La Paz, salt flasts). It’s wide streets betray an optimistic future, while the roughly built houses give a closer picture of reality. The very new hotel we stayed in was obviously an owner-architect job, with staircases and walkways set up in such a way to require you to go down stairs and across a void before going up a level, reminding me a lot of a Escher painting.

The way to get to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile from Uyuni is to get on a 4WD tour for 3 days that takes you over the salt flat and then out into the desert on the way down to the border. Along the way you’ll see seven coloured mountains, desert, geyser fields, red lakes, green lakes and lots of bright pink flamingos, and spend some time in some very natural looking hot springs. It’s the crazy clash of unnatural colours that leads people to constantly describe everything as “surreal”, even though it really does lack the melting clocks and incongruous fish that you need to make something truly surreal. So I’m going to do my best to make no more Salvador Dali allusions for the rest of this entry.

The salt flats start about half an hour outside Uyuni and despite all that’s been written about them and no matter how many pictures you see of them, nothing really prepares you for just how out of wack your perception of distance and perspective goes when you’re faced with so much white all the way to the horizon. It fools camera autofocus pretty well, so you get time to spend ages lining people up to make it look like they are eating a tiny 4WD, holding the next person on their palm or (as the group I was with got creative in a toilet humour kind of way) tiny people being farted out of someone’s bare arse or being wee-ed on by a giant. The photo I liked best was the Matrix style kung fu kick the two girls in our jeep did, which managed to make it look like they were kicking each other in the face even though they were metres apart.

We stopped for lunch at the hotel made out of salt, which is probably really bad for the area but also highly cool and took our first set of photos on ground that had been tracked over by 4WDs and Jeeps almost constantly, so it was good to get away from there and out into the more remote bit of the salar, where the ground is crystallised into almost perfectly regular hexagons in all directions, some natural consequence of how salt water solidifies played out on a massive scale. With the sun low on the horizon you get a reddish hue on everything and the salt crystals sparkle in the light, giving in an almost computer-rendered un-realness. You drive towards the mountains in the distance but it seems to take an endless amount of time for them to get any closer, because you have no foreground to judge distance with.

During these tours you can expect to be really cold most of the time, with the days being short and the desert night being brutal. The accommodation is really basic so I probably spent the nights sleeping in more clothes than I have anywhere else on this trip. You can also expect to be routinely Bolivia-ed (much like being Argentina-ed, but the Bolivians seem to take an unnatural pride in just how thoroughly and unexpectedly they can screw a bit more money out of you), like when we were slugged with a $25 park entry fee we weren’t warned about. Fine, except when you’re expecting to be in Chile the next day you don’t always carry a large amount of Bolivianos with you. It’s not like you can’t afford it, but why there’s always surprise hidden costs when things are so cheap blows the mind. We were Bolivia-ed for a 15 Boliviano exit fee from the country (about $2) which seemed to just go into the border guards pockets, and because the woman at the tour office had taken $10 off us for a transfer into Chile that everyone seemed to have forgotten about we almost had to pay for that twice. Luckily we made the driver of our 4WD call Uyuni, confirm again we’d payed and then front the money out of his own pocket with the hope of getting the money back from the tour company on the way back. Bolivia is full of cool stuff to see but dealing with the Bolivians tends to leave a bad taste in the mouth.

This is the crazy thing about the country. You could travel the whole thing by only dealing with gringos, as there is almost a parallel tourist infrastructure overlayed over the top of the country which is run by ex-pats. These tour companies, transport lines and hostels tell you all the costs up front, provide English speakers to guide you and most importantly are highly reliable. Nearly every one of these companies has a Bolivian run equivalent (or in many cases imitator) where you can expect to be thoroughly Bolivia-ed at some point in your dealings with them.  You may want to support local business, but that is almost certainly going to have your tour cancel without telling you or have you sailing down the World’s Most Dangerous Road on a bike with suspect breaks. Read into this what you will.

I had originally decided not to do the North of Chile at any point on this trip but I was glad to pass by the perfect snow covered volcano cone that marks the border and find myself on a paved dual carriage way marked with readable road signs. It’s stark how big a change you’re confronted with by going from South America’s poorest country to its richest. It’s a border crossing the Bolivians think shouldn’t exist, with the Atacama being one of the prizes the Chilean’s won off Bolivia in the 1800s War of the Pacific, turning Bolivia into a land-locked basket case (though to be fair, Bolivia would still have it if they didn’t suck so much at wars) and when they region stopped making Chileans rich from nitrate mining and went on to making them rich from copper mining that only rubbed salt into the wounds. I don’t like making generalisations about a whole people, but mentioning Chile to Bolivians tends to turn them into surly, angry arseholes. They still seem to blame Chile for their poverty to a certain degree.

San Pedro de Atacama is the first town of consequence over the border and despite there being no paved roads you can tell almost immediately you’re no longer in Bolivia. The menus are about 3 or 4 times expensive, hostel beds are maybe triple the price and the streets aren’t paved with garbage and wee. SPdA is a nice little town to spend a few days exploring the surrounding countryside, and despite not feeling the need to see salt flats, geysers or flamingos again, there was a still a lot of unique things Bolivia didn’t have to keep you interested.  We spent a day riding mountain bikes out to Laguna Cejar (thank God the desert is totally flat!), which is so dense with salt that you float effortlessly in it, much like the Dead Sea. What is different is there’s a two inch layer of freezing cold water that sits on top of the lake, under which is bath warm water that seems  to be the bit that makes you float. You can actually see the line where the thin water on top hits the thinner, saltier warmer water, but it also means that when you put your feet up for the classic floating effortlessly photo you have to do so with most of your body in freezing cold water. It was pleasant to be at neck height (so your shoulders were warm but your neck was cold) but you kind of had to psyche yourself up and count to 3 before you let your ankles float to the surface, you squealed like a little girl, your picture got taken and then you forced your feet back under to the warmth. It was a very different experience, floating in the water, looking out to perfectly flat land in all directions bumping up against the snow capped peaks of extinct volcanoes on all sides.

The other big day trip was out to the Moon Valley and the Mars Valley, both named because their landscape looks like you’d imagine the surface of those celestial bodies to look like. The Mars Valley is also blessed with a high black sand dune which attracts people wanting to do a bit of sand-boarding, but after two other goes at sand-boarding on this trip I didn’t really feel I needed to spend the money on a 3^rd. Instead it was nice to sit on a ridge out overlooking the Moon Valley and watch the mountain range that includes the volcanoes light up red once the sun had set.

The Atacama desert is blessed with some of the clearest sky in the world, and over 320 cloudless days a year, so it’s become ground zero for land based telescopes. Several agencies are building a radio-telescope array that is going to dwarf anything else on the planet and many others already exist. This also makes it a good place for us tourists to go out and gaze into a telescope at night. The company we went with had invested in building an observatory with a moving dome and 150x computer controlled telescope so we got to take it in turns gazing at mars, the moon and big clusters of stars, including the cluster of millions of stars that live inside the Southern Cross, but which are basically invisible to the naked eye. My favourite was looking at Saturn with it’s rings and three of it’s moons visible, which almost looked fake the view was so perfect. It was interesting to have the guide explain how to use the Southern Cross to local south no matter what time of night it was, something the Canadians and Americans in the group might not find interesting or useful but I kind of did.

The trip from Uyuni and all the stuff around SPdA marks the last full week of my 6 and a bit month tour of South America and I felt like I unintentionally saved some of the highlights for last. I’m writing this in a café in the Calama airport, about an hour’s drive from SPdA and I have a couple more hours to wait for an afternoon flight back to Santiago, where I began the trip all those months ago. I’ve already got myself booked into a nice hotel for 3 days and the end of the trip is more real by the fact I now know every bus, plane and bed I’m going to be in until I land in Sydney next Tuesday afternoon (it’s already Friday!). I plan on doing basically nothing touristy this time in Santiago, and instead trying to get myself into a head space where I can contemplate returning to The Real World. 

Open Veins

Potosi :: Bolivia

It's dark, and hot as hell.

Places: Sucre & Potosi.

Coolest thing I did: Went on one of those tours that are only possible in the 3rd world. There's very few places at home you could handle dynamite with no formal training at all.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: La Paz isn't actually Bolivia's capital. They just moved the government there and no-one seemed to care. Perhaps we could do the same to Canberra.

My arrival to Sucre was marked by marching. The taxi driver was forced to take a pretty circular route to get into the middle of town mostly due to the fact the streets around the main square were clogged by children dressed up in military costumes marching about. I later found out from the Dutch woman who made me my lunch that marching is not optional, the day I arrived it was the primary school kids, the next day the high schoolers and the day after all people in public employment. Failure to march gets you docked 3 days pay. There's nothing like patriotism that run so deep it has to be enforced by diktat.

The old colonial heart of Sucre doesn't feel at all like Bolivia - the streets are laid out in a regular grid, the streets are lined with old colonial houses or white washed churches and the parks are well kept. If it wasn't all the kids dressed as adorable little revolutionaries causing gridlock for the whole time I was there I would even go as far to say that stuff seems to work in a very un-Bolivian way in Sucre. If I was a local and I wanted my kids to have a good future I'd get them to take an apprenticeship in white washing churches - there seems to be no end of work. The thing about Sucre is there really isn't that much to do in town (you can go out of town and look at a quarry full of dinosaur prints if that tickles your taco), you mostly just mooch about the place, drink passable coffee and watch the world go by. I spent most of my only afternoon there in a cafe that looks out over the city drinking a lot of coffee and contemplating the world.

So why is Sucre such a nice, un-Bolivian city? The answer lay 3 hours to the west, in a town called Potosi, which for a very long time could have been considered the beating heart of the Spanish Empire. On the bus in from Sucre you can't help but notice a massive multicoloured mountain dwarfing the city, Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain) which was the cause of so much joy to it's Spanish discoverers and so much misery to just about everyone who came after them. For nearly 400 years people have been mining Cerro Rico for silver, and that silver funded Western Europe's rise to total dominance over the rest of the world. One of it's immediate effects was to make Sucre and Potosi fairly independent from the rest of Spanish Peru, and laid the foundation for Bolivia to steak it's claim as a separate country to Peru after independence, even if Lima had ruled all of Bolivia back when the Spaniards were in charge.

That wealth built all the stately buildings in Sucre, after all it's not by chance that all the alter pieces, bloody crucified Jesuses and serene Marys are all decked out in silver in some way. Potosi however, the source of all the wealth didn't seem to develop along the same well planned lines as Sucre, with the streets all jumbled together and the occasional oversized church erected to increase the prestige of one of the new rich fashioned from silver money. However, in truth most people remained poor, with nearly all of the silver being  stamped into coins, packed into trunks and making the voyage over the sea to the Spanish treasury (well those that didn't get waylaid by British and Dutch pirates).

There are very few estimates of how much silver from Potosi made it's way to Spain, but due to Spain being a fading empire much of that silver eventually went to fund the Industrial Revolution in England, setting the stage for the British to rule a full quarter of the Earth's surface. What is sure, however, was the Spanish were true to form in wanting to get that silver out of Latin America at the lowest cost possible. They press ganged the native into mining for them, and when they turned out to be a bit rebellious to go down mines that collapsed with dangerous regularly they imported African slaves to do the work. That also turned out to be a tough strategy to work out, seeing as most of the Africans were used to hot weather and living at sea level and Potosi is freezing cold and at 4000+m above sea level. Working under extreme altitude sickness tended to mean the slaves died at a fairly unprofitable rate, meaning the Spanish had to resort to tactics like holding whole villages hostage to get the natives to work down the mines. There was no attempt to build local industry, like happened in British North America, this was pure extraction.

Just to show how rich the veins of silver in Potosi were, there are still large co-operatives of miners tunnelling there way into what has to be an anthill of tunnels trying to extract what's left. To go and visit one of these co-operative mines is really the only reason you'd find yourself in Potosi as a tourist. They deck you out in gum boots, waterproofs and a helmet with a head torch and then it's off to the miners' market to buy gifts for the miners you are going to encounter on the way down into the hill. What do you get the miner that has everything? Apparently coca leaves (as they don't eat during an 8 hour shift), juice and water (because it's up to 50 degrees down there), 96% ethanol (which they drink) and dynamite (wait, what?). Apparently anyone who wants it can go to the market and buy sticks of dynamite, complete with blasting caps. That probably explains some of the louder bangs I was hearing during the street protests in La Paz.

Metaphors about the mines being like Hell continue to this day, but going through the entry into the mines, all stained red with iron oxide you can see how highly superstitious people managed to consider themselves on their way into the underworld to steal all Satan's wealth. They call him Tio, and at the entry to the mine you find a cow's skull where you can make an offering to Tio, so he won't collapse the mine on you and let you take his silver. He seems to like coca leaves. It reminded me of the sacrifices to Jesus Malverde, the patron saint of narcotrafficantes in Mexico. I guess you make your own traditions sometimes.

The mining tours, it must be said, are only something that could exist somewhere like Bolivia. It's totally unsafe, with you having to press up against the wall when 2 ton rail carts come screaming around the corner with no breaks, you have to climb down steep shafts on your hands and knees, you have just a bandanna tied around your mouth to stop you from breathing in too much of the dust that kills miners of silicosis after about a 20 year working life and there are people working with jackhammers and dynamite somewhere around you, you're not just sure where. It would probably make the brain of the average OH&S officer in Australia split in half in a bloody mess.

You just can't really explain how hard the lives these guys live is down there. Breaking rocks with sledge hammers and carting out the debris in the hope that after processing it will contain minerals worth selling. The grade of silver left in Cerro Rico isn't really good enough for jewellery they told me, and most of it goes off to East Asia to be turned into bits of mobile phone. It's processed with such nice stuff as arsenic and cyanide (they stopped with mercury a little while ago now...) so working above ground in the processing plants probably won't do much more for your life expectancy than working underground. I'm not exactly sure I understood how these so-called co-operatives distribute the wealth they find, but it seems like some miners get paid better than the man driving a taxi or working in a kitchen and some don't. The conditions are not the kind of thing you'd find in the west - Australia's miners now seem to operate solely by chopping entire mountains down to get at the stuff inside, which is much safer for the workers, who are also famously well paid. They tell me they yield about 4 usable tonnes of stuff (not all of it silver) from the 90 tonnes of rock they pull out of the mountain every day, which probably explains why no big global mining company has had any reason to chop Cerro Rico down once and for all for what little goodies remain at it's core.

One thing that stands out here is El Presidente Evo Morales isn't exactly a popular figure, either with the conservatives of Sucre or the miners of Potosi. The former tended to do very well out of the old regimes that entrenched the gains of the small middle and upper classes while keeping the poor down, and the latter are quite pissed off that this man that looks just like them, who came to the mines and promised them the conditions would improve long before he was elected to high office. If you add the road blocks, the protests and so on you do wonder how long this guy can manage to stay in charge. What does strike me however, that unlike Cuba or the pre-revolutionary Middle East is that the Bolivians will proclaim quite loudly in the street they don't like him - that lack of fear does make you think that there is a chance he could be replaced by boring, democratic means.

So today is a bit quiet about town because it's one of the 3 days a year that the miners take their families up to the mines to see whole llamas sacrificed (apparently llama foetuses are more regular sacrifices, but a whole llama is a bit deal) in order to bring new riches to them and their families. I'm really tight on time now so I'm hopping a bus at midday to Uyuni, my last real stop in Bolivia before going across the salt flats and desert to get back into Chile, to the town of San Pedro de Atacama. I've booked a flight back to Santiago next Friday (6 days time!) and then the trip is basically over. I've been promised that these salt flats are something else, so hopefully I've saved the best until last.

Cause and Effect

Sucre :: Bolivia

Man, do I now hate sand flies.

Places: Rurrenabaque, Madidi National Park, La Paz & Sucre.

Coolest thing I did: Went fishing for piranhas with chunks of steak. Only Ricardo the Guide caught one though.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Bolivians seem to love putting a statue of a military figure in every free town square, round about or supermarket forecourt. Which is strange seeing as they don't seem to have ever won a war. Ever.

I would like to start by sending out a big thanks to everyone who responded to the recent bloody pictures of my face with "when are you going to shave and get a haircut?". I now wonder if I lose a limb I'm going to get "man you look pale. Get some sun!". It's becoming apparent that the locals agree with you. I think my favourite "get a haircut" reference of the week was being called Karl Marx after a bar fight (due to the fact the only thing left from my bike crash is a persistent black eye). I'd shave, but it gives the police manning the road blocks a big laugh to see my passport photo from 10 years ago vs. me now. I couldn't take that away from them.

After a relaxing night in the town of Rurrenabaque I got on a South East Asian style long tail boat and was taken 5 hours up river to the ultra posh Chalalan Lodge, an "eco" resort owned by the local people who happened to be living in the Madidi National Park when it was declared a national park and wisely decided to go for the high end tourist to cash in on their luck. They've built a pipeline of new guides, giving them training on English, how to behave around rich white people, what to show rich white people in the jungle and stuff like that. Our guide Richard (because apparently Americans have trouble with saying "Ricardo", which sounds like bollocks to me) has been doing it for about a decade and seemed to have a very good knack for pointing out stuff around us as we walked and boated about the place, even if he did have a pretty lazy pace of speech and was not a many of many words. The Canadians I was with chose to take offence to this, but I kind of liked his lack of enthusiasm - it was mildly refreshing.

The eco lodge itself has running water, showers where you can use soap and all the mod-cons, so I'm not sure what exactly makes it "eco", but it was a very nice place to chill out in a hammock, eat decent food (except for the beef that was inexplicably the only thing the chef charred to rubber every time) and go swimming in the lake which also houses quite a few caimans (caimen?). You have to wash your insect repellent off before taking a swim because apparently DEET is somehow poisonous to basically everything it touches, which means if you sit on the dock like me taking in the view for about half an hour you're going to get bitten to hell by sand flies and end up with hundreds of little bite marks all over you. Gay as. I only took a couple of swims, and was told that if I wanted to actually see the caimans I had to swim either very late at dusk or at night, but to be honest I just didn't want to get bitten any more. Instead I spent most evenings reading The Girl Who Played With Fire. It took me like 3 days. I'm not sure who Stieg Larsson was in life, but those books are like crack. For those who can get over the bits where his Swedish obsession with violent sex comes out a little bit too graphically.

So you spend your days either in boats or walking through the jungle, both during the day and at night to try and learn a bit about the ecosystem around you. From Ricardo's explanations it seems to me that everything has the basic purpose in life of being food for something else, a massive chain of cause and effect. The girls would say "ah, that's pretty" to a butterfly and Ricardo would go "frogs eat those" or some such. Realist, that man.

So the highlights for me were the tiny little coloured frogs that were all deadly poison, the metre long snake that crossed our path by accident, the two separate stampedes of wild pigs that we could hear coming just in the nick of time to get out of the trail and watch them blur past (the biggest was well over 100 pigs) and nearly tripping over a 1.5m black caiman in the dark. Oh, and of course the monkeys. There's several species of small faced monkeys living in the Madidi NP and since the locals stopped eating them for bush meat they tend to be fairly un-bothered by people at all. Probably the highlight was a whole bunch of little yellow and little brown monkeys (the second ones called cappuccinos, I guess for their brown fur and white faces) coming right down into the lodge and eating all the mandarins from the tree outside the kitchen. They also tried the grapefruits but apparently find them a bit acidic so mostly throw them on the ground. Which meant you had to be careful where you stood and took your pictures just in case you got hit with a falling citrus of some kind.

We spent one morning in a leaky boat (I had to bail while Ricardo rowed) fishing for piranhas with chunks of steak, on loose hand lines with no sinkers. This meant you basically could feel the fish nibbling on the meat (because they have small mouths) but you had to be very good at timing when to yank on your line to hook one, and I mostly came up with a bare hook. Apparently a whole school of them can finish off a calf so fast it looks like the water around it is boiling, but on their own a single piranha isn't that scary looking. Of course, I didn't go swimming in that particular lake. Ricardo managed to hook us a fish so we could have our picture taken with it's sharp teeth sticking out, which was kind of cool but would have been better if it was one I'd caught myself.

I think my man crush on Ricardo really came into it's own on Sunday night, which was when the staff treat the guests to some of their local music and dancing. No-one dresses up, you drink some concoction of milk, cinnamon and rum and the dancing is just silly. You know when kids dance by just doing bits of every move they know? Well it was just like that. The music was drums and pan pipes which alternated between passable and terrible depending on the seemingly endless song and it seemed mostly so the trainee guides could try and seduce the single gringas. Richard basically spent the night sitting on a bar stool getting smashed on beers. When I was dancing with the girl who cooked our food and she looked like she'd rather be anywhere else I kind of thought I'd rather be sitting on a bar stool getting smashed on beers too.

Apparently my description of the evening was racist, but I'm not sure how. I described it as that bit at the end of Return of the Jedi when the ewoks are all playing music and dancing to celebrate the Death Star being destroyed. Because that's what it looked like.

So the Lodge itself is a model for getting the locals to have a steak in keeping the National Park in good condition, as everyone is an owner, guide or supplier to the Lodge in the village and keeping it pristine is their livelihood. There are other lodges and tours, but all are based outside the Park and have to boat in every day, whereas we were able to finish dinner, grab our flashlights and go looking for tarantulas to take photos of. That was kind of cool. You also get woken up on clear days by howler monkeys re-establishing their territory vocally, but we only heard that one day because it's the tail end of the wet season on the jungle side of the Andes and it rained most mornings.

The best alternative trip I heard about is run by a totally unlicensed Israeli army veteran (aren't they all?) who takes people out to the jungle to hunt all their own food, build their own rafts for transport and their own huts to live in. That would explain the massive amounts of Israeli's I was seeing around town in Rurre, probably the first big concentration I've seen in all of Bolivia. The Bolivians are slightly miffed about the whole thing, but I guess you don't mess with a bloke who regularly kills caimen for food with a bunch of tourists helping out.

My trip out to the jungle was always going to be a little borderline, time-wise mostly because this is Bolivia. I'd been told the last night bus for Sucre in the south leaves La Paz at 8pm so it was awesome to get to the airport in Rurre and find that there was no plane waiting for us. Luckily we were only two hours delayed (not two days) getting onto that 18 seat Fairchild turbo prop and had a fairly quick 30 min flight back to La Paz. It was crazy to have the plane climb pretty much straight up from the jungle (120m above sea level) and basically just make it high enough to get over the ridgeline of the mountains before dropping only like 5 mins to land in La Paz (somewhere in the order of 3,800m above sea level). Lucky for me I did manage to still have time to hop a night bus and this morning I arrived in the old (well technically current) capital of Bolivia, Sucre.

Sovereign state of the have-nots

Rurrenabaque :: Bolivia

Even the rich people here are poor.

Places: La Paz, Tiwanaku & Rurrenabaque.

Coolest thing I did: Saw the inside of my nose and ears through a fibre optic camera in the ear, nose and throat specialist's office. And my nose isn't broken.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: I've just been told it's safe to swim with caimans (the other subspecies of alligator, along with "alligator"). That idea may take some getting used to.

So after visiting two doctors and racking up a medical bill around the order of $45 (which is actually less than my excess so it's not worth even claiming) it turns out my nose isn't actually broken after all. To find this out I had to get a taxi to Zona Sur, which is the poshest part of La Paz, but to tell the truth it's full of the same low rent mud-brick and concrete buildings as the rest of the city in most parts of it. The specialist lived in a medical centre in one of the better shopping centres in town, which would probably have been one of the worst shopping centres in town in Sydney. It was also the only part of town with such things as supermarkets, which is a novelty here. The reason, is because La Paz is full of povs.

Bolivia is the highest, poorest and most indigenous of all the countries in South America, and the flow of the poor rural population into La Paz is probably taking place at a far more rapid pace than anywhere else in the continent. A whole extra city, El Alto is growing up on the plateau above La Paz itself, and urban planning isn't a concept that is fairly heavily enforced. All those people have to do something to make a living, otherwise it wouldn't have been worth their time immigrating into the city from the provinces and walking the streets of downtown La Paz you get the feel for what those people do. The reason that there doesn't even seem to be 7-11 style corner shops, let alone supermarkets in the downtown is because every several metres there's an old woman in traditional costume manning a stall that sells some subsection of what you'd find in a convenience store. One may sell only bottles of Coke, another only Pringles, a third only batteries. It's highly inefficient, but you get the feeling you couldn't actually run a shop here because you'd be competing with labour costs of basically zero.

The roads are choked with minivans and clapped out Taragos, which are the primary form of transport in the larger urban area that makes up La Paz and El Alto. To run one of these all you need to seem to have is a driver and someone to sit in the passenger door yelling out where you're going - which also seems to be fairly fluid depending on where most of the existing passengers want to go. This job (which I guess you would call "conductor") seems to have no stereotype, as I saw old ladies in bowler hats, teen-aged girls in hoodies, middle aged punks and the rest of a diverse cross section of La Paz society taking up this place.

One thing that always seems confronting is to be approached by someone is a baseball cap and balaclava, however in La Paz that person most likely wants to polish your shoes. For some reason (the Lonely Planet cites stigma) the shoe shine boys and men mostly wear balaclavas, which I guess would come in handy if you also decided to take up armed robbery as a sideline.

So free of the medical profession I decided it was time to go and do some stuff, so I took a day trip back out towards Lake Titicaca to see Bolivia's most impressive ruins, Tiwanaku. This was a precursor civilisation to the Incas, but unlike many of the peoples conquered by them in Peru and Ecuador, Tiwanaku was in ruins long before the Inca arrived on the scene in Bolivia. If you've just come from Peru then the bits that have been excavated and restored probably won't impress you that much. If Machu Picchu is a 2 or 3 on the imagination-required scale then Tiwanaku would probably be an 8. There is ongoing work to excavate a step pyramid that dominates the site, but we were told that the bits that were excavated and restored in the 1960s and 70s were put together with very little scholarly research and probably look nothing at all like the original site (and probably were reconstructed using poorer levels of stone masonry than the Tiwanaku used themselves back in the day). There are some cool bits, like a lower chamber that is lined with stone heads, the best guess being this represented the underworld and the heads were the chiefs of peoples conquered by the Tiwanaku. One of two of them have strangely elongated heads, and some of the stones are carved with strangely straight (ie., machine cut) lines, hence many people have now added 2 and 2 and got the answer "aliens built it". What is it with pyramids and alien conspiracy theories? Can't people believe people are actually capable of this kind of thing without resorting to deus ex machina of aliens?

The protests inside La Paz itself continue, but the more disruptive transport workers seem to have either gotten sick of breathing in teargas, or (more likely) the current occupant of Palacio Quemado has caved into whatever it was they were demanding. Since 2005 Bolivia has been run by Evo Morales, the most indigenous President in South American (and possibly world) history, so it seems kind of strange every law he passes these days results in mass protests. His previous job was head of the coca growers union, and his early actions didn't exactly endear him to the occupants of the White House. He expelled the DEA and their coca eradication program, being of the opinion that cocaine was an Norte Americano problem and the growers in the foothills of the Andes in Bolivia shouldn't suffer as a result. I'm pretty much convinced that one side effect of that is Route 36.

Possibly the only openly run and operated cocaine bar in the world, Route 36 is a club that changes venues about every 6 months and sells grams of cocaine over the counter, allowing it's patrons to go ahead and snort as much as they want on the coffee tables in the bar. I'm convinced this is allowed to operate mostly because someone is bribing the police, the "cocaine" they sell is cut with what seems like 90% or so speed (judging by the patron's teeth grinding and inability to finish a sentence) and the patrons are almost exclusively gringos who are all basically junkies anyway, right? I'd say you'd have trouble running a place like that, even in a country with corruptible police if the society at large didn't blame the users rather than the suppliers.

Drugs also were involved in the rise of what was once La Paz' most notorious tourist attraction: the San Pedro prison. In 1995 an Englishman named Thomas McFadden was convicted for cocaine trafficking by a Bolivian court and ended up in San Pedro, smack bang in the middle of La Paz. It's apparently a bizarre world, where the inmates have to buy their own cell and pretty much keep bribing people to stay alive. After a rough start Mr McFadden managed to become a serious force inside the prison, bribing the guards to allow him to run tours for backpackers, one of whom was a budding Australian journalist called Rusty Young, who though the story so preposterous he spent months documenting it and used the material to write the hostel bookshelf staple Marching Powder. That was 2003 and that book pretty much made a tour to San Pedro an obligatory stop on the gringo trail through Bolivia. For years it was possible to bribe your way inside, take as much cocaine paste as you could buy (a steady stream of income for the inmates) and tell nudge-nudge wink-wink stories from the Darien Gap to Ushuaia, which fuelled even more intense interest. Then in 2009 a Youtube video of the tour, including cocaine use by the tourists became a talking point in the Bolivian media and a large scale clampdown on the guards and prisoners liberties pretty much put a stop to these illegal tours. That's the most plausible story I heard (another that seems common is of two Australian girls being raped in the goal, but that seems to be more rumour than anything else) and I wasn't even approached on the street by people trying to sell me a fake tour outside the prison, as used to be common even 12 months ago. Apparently Brad Pitt is funding a movie based on the book, so I'd expect it to all explode again when that comes out.

This morning saw me getting into a tiny turbo prop plane (about 16 seats) where I was able to see the pilots for a brief flight over the Andes and down into the jungle at Rurrenabaque. While the Amazon itself passes way up north, through Brazil, along the border with Colombia and Peru and up into Ecuador the Amazon basin covers something like a 1/3rd of the continent and much of the area covered by Bolivia is covered in jungle. Due to timing issues I never got into the jungle in any other country and that would mean I wouldn't get to take all those highly expensive anti-malarials I've been carrying since Sydney. Which I'm now doing and kind of make me feel like I've got malaria, but perhaps they're supposed to do that. It's got to be better than actual malaria. I'm disappearing into a high class ecolodge thing for the next 4 days so tales of swimming with the cousins of alligators to come.

Not so pretty any more

La Paz :: Bolivia

"After effects of tear gas" - last Google search on the hostel computer in La Paz

Places: La Paz, Yolosa & Huayna Potosi.

Coolest thing I did: Climbed my first mountain above the magic 6000m mark, which just beats out riding a mountain bike down the World's Most Dangerous Road.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The original Copacabana is the one on Lake Titicaca, even though the one in Brazil is far more famous.

Arriving in La Paz by night turned out to be a well worthwhile experience. The city started in the depths of the Choqueyapu River valley and has spent the last 400 or so years growing up the valley walls, so when you come in during darkness it's like a bowl of stars below. It's only when you look at the place the following morning that you see that most of those lights belong to a shambolic pile of red clay and mud brick houses that have been growing all around the city proper over the last century or so. Like the rest of South America, the rural poor have been coming to La Paz to make up for the lack of opportunities in their old villages and solving shortages of housing themselves, often with no planning. It's the same effect as Bogota or Medellin, only it feels much more compressed here, because the valley walls are so much closer.

Waking up on my first morning I was greeted to the sight of riot police blockading the end of the street and was told there was a protest heading down from Plaza Murillo, where the Palacio Quemado (so called because it has a habit of burning to the ground about once every 50 years or so) houses the President, and the police might try and stop them. I sat in the courtyard and heard the popping of fireworks, then teargas cannisters being fired, and then finally what I think they were telling me was dynamite, but that last one could be wrong. I ended up getting a bit bored, and needed money so ended up going past a few protests (yes, there's more than one going on at the same time) and saw that so long as they didn't break ranks the police pretty much left them alone. They almost seemed to be having a carnival, shown in my favourite photo from the protests: a clown juggling 3 empty teargas grenades in front of the police.

An Aussie mate of mine, Sam, who I met while he was stuck in Copacabana waiting for the roads to clear, got a whole lot closer, walking back to his hostel when the crowd started running towards him. They were all laughing, so he thought it was safe enough until he got a face full of smoke and ended up with a feeling like he'd just been rubbing chilli in his eyes. Kind of glad I've still never managed to be tear gassed. Touch wood.

What is there to do in La Paz? Well in La Paz itself it seems not that much. There's churches, presidential palaces and a tourist ghetto based around The Witches Market, which as far as I can tell sells nothing to do with witches, but lots of stuff made out of llama and alpaca wool, mostly with pictures of llamas and alpacas knitted into them. What most of the gringos seem to be doing around here is organising to do other stuff, just outside La Paz. If you're a backpacker, then you're almost certainly going to ride a mountain bike down the World's Most Dangerous Road (WMDR).

Since the 1930s the WMDR was simply called the Yungas Road, as it was the road that led from La Paz to the Yungas region and then from there onto Bolivia's chunk of the Amazon basin. During the 1930s Bolivia was fighting a war with Paraguay, only one of 4 countries Bolivia was destined to lose a war to since it's independence, robbing it of basically half it's territory. Anyway the Bolivians finished the road using captured Paraguayan soldiers, many of which obviously died in it's construction. It stretches from La Cumbre at 4700m and drops all the way down to Yolosa at 1100m, all over a rocky 64km which can be as narrow as 3.2m in places and has sheer cliffs off to one side, often with a 1000m drop over the edge. Due to these obvious design flaws people have been going off the edges in cars, trucks and buses in most of the intervening years, causing the Inter-American Development Bank to do a study and christen the road the WMDR. The idea was to use that name to raise money to built a much safer replacement, but that had the side effect of drawing tourists to see it. People have been going down it, especially on mountain bikes ever since, and that alone has killed about 30 people.

We didn't have a clear day, which was probably good to start with. The cloud masked just how deep some of the cliffs are, and I'm told also hid the carcasses of the various trucks and buses that have gone over the edge of the road during the last 80-odd years. The new road was finished about 5 years ago, so most of the traffic on the WMDR is now tourists, but it is a public road which people still do live on, so occasionally you will have cars coming around blind corners at you, just to make life interesting.

I went with the most famous of the tour companies Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking, who have a reputation for safety, top notch equipment and probably most importantly, have never had a fatality. I thought that last bit was worth the extra money. I've never ridden a proper downhill mountain bike before and found the whole thing very cool. They were dual suspension bikes with hydraulic disk brakes, meaning there was a bit of instruction at first on how they were meant to be handled. Basically you shouldn't be braking very often, as that deforms the bike and doesn't let the suspension do it's job, but when you do it's a case of light application on both front and rear brakes just before a corner or obstacle (like a gravel pit) and letting the bike roll through and do it's job. The bikes corner really smoothly over the roughest terrain and so long as you aren't actually sitting on the seat (which our guide, an Irishman called Paddy described as the "one night in prison syndrome") the ride was very comfortable.

The downhill is broken up into sections so the guides can tell you what is coming up next and to stop the group from stretching out too much. As you go along there is a guide taking pictures and videos for you, so you don't have to (though many of them were pretty damn blurry) and slow up the rest of the group. By the time you start the second quarter of the ride you're starting to really let the bike run and build up a bit of speed. Of course, this makes you a bit overconfident sometimes, and if you're like me you'd pretty much stopped breaking before corners by the time the second 1/3rd of the road starts.

This would be silly of you.

So at the spot we'd just been told a Frenchwoman went over the edge on a mountain bike some years ago I took a tight hairpin turn way too fast, went wide into the ditch on the wall side (thankfully not the cliff side!) and the bike got the serious wobbles. I panicked and hit the front break hard without touching the back break and the laws of Isaac Newton took over. I went right over the handlebars and had one of those moments like Wile E. Coyote has when he realises there's nothing under the cloud he's standing on and has a little sign reading "uh-oh".

That lasted until my momentum was stopped by the helmet, my shoulder and pretty much the entire right hand side of my face. I was a little in shock but managed to get back on the bike and ride back with the rest of the group, and it was only looking at the faces of other people looking at my face that I realised just how much gore there was on it. Paddy cleaned it up as best he could using surgical alcohol (which hurt more than the accident, I think) and I continued on, this time as one of the slowest in the group, right until the end.

Each of the companies ends at a different spot, and ours was in a wildlife sanctuary in the village of Yolosa. It started out as a place for animals (mostly monkeys) rescued from the illegal exotic animal trade but now has taken on epic proportions. Most of the animals appear so fearless of humans that they could never be released back into the wild, but it does bring in tourists and volunteers, mostly because monkeys are both cute and awesome. One little howler monkey took a shine to sitting on my head and wrapping his tail around my neck and after a while I just let him be and forgot he was even there most of the time. There's a few pictures of me floating around out there with a bashed in face and a monkey on my head.

The minibus used as a support vehicle then drives you back up the WMDR to La Paz, and by this time the clouds had cleared so you can see just how crazy the drops are. The driver stopped at the narrowest point (where Jeremy Clarkson had to reverse his Range Rover for those of you who have seen the Top Gear episode from Bolivia) and opened the door so we could take pictures over the edge. It was literally a 1000m drop right outside the door, a pretty scary sight. Still, there's no-one like the Bolivians to take an embarrassingly deadly piece of infrastructure and turn it into a tourist attraction.

So I probably should have gone directly to the doctor but my face was still all swollen up, and the British doctor in our group who had done his internship in ear, nose and throat told me they wouldn't be able to do much until that went down. Instead I'd already given a couple of Aussies (Dan & Dylan) I'd met in Huaraz carte blanche to book me on a trek with them the next day to climb Huayna Potosi, a mountain in the Cordillera Real so I had to be ready at 9am for that.

So overlooking the cityscape of La Paz are several snowcapped peaks and the one that most first timers like myself take on is Huayna Potosi. This is popular because it's a whole 88m above the magical 6000m mark, is the easiest 6000m climb in the world and is much less technical than the other slightly higher peaks in the area. I'd been planning to do this one to kind of make up for the failure to get a group together to do El Misti in Peru and when Dan organised the whole thing it turned out to be easier than I thought. They'd also independently met Jenny, a Swedish girl I'd gotten the bus from Puno to Copa with, and had an American mate Gabe who was also with them. John, an Irishman I'd been staying with in the hostel also turned out to be doing it on the same tour so there was 6 of us ready to go.

After a brief introduction on using ice axes, crampons (boot spikes) and the like to stop yourself from falling off the mountain and a night spent in front of the fire in what must be the world's nicest refuge it's time to start the climb from the road at 4750m (which is the highest I'd ever gone under my own steam before) to the first real refuge at 5300m, including the last 200m above the snow line. Now I've had my problems with the altitude in the past, but the thing that really got me this time was just how weak I felt walking up hill in that rapidly thinning mountain air. I think by the time we got to the refuge we were all complaining of headaches and some nausea, so even the best of us were a little bit in new territory.  It also turns out Gabe trained as a mountain EMT in the states, so had a hypochondriac level knowledge of the effects of altitude related sicknesses. One of the more common fatal sicknesses that take people at altitude is High altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), one of the main symptoms of which is a hacking cough. By that time we'd made a bit of a joke of it, referring to any symptom as The HAPE coming on. In all seriousness though, both the HAPE and it's nastier cousin, the HACE (which is where you brain basically implodes) can both be fatal and in extreme cases people need to be brought down to sea level and often put in the same kinds of hyperbaric chambers divers are cured of the Bends in.

Which is a worry in Bolivia, seeing as it has no sea level. Bolivia lost wars with Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay (seriously? Paraguay?) in it's early years, but none stung so much as it's loss to Chile during the War of the Pacific. It was the 1870s and the world had just gone crazy for nitrate, as it was being used in massive quantities in fertilizer and Bolivia and Peru were sitting on tonnes of it in the Atacama Desert and surrounds. Most of this was being mined by Chilean companies and a series of perceived threats to this business caused war to break out, resulting in Chile handing both Peru and Bolivia their metaphorical arses. As a result Peru lost some land, Bolivia became land locked and Chile became the world leader in nitrate mining. Just to add insult to injury the biggest yielding copper mine of all time, Chuquicamata and the currently biggest annual yielding copper mine, Escondida both ended up being found under land lost by Bolivia in this war. This still gets brought up every time the Bolivians and Chileans play each other at soccer.

So with the risk of HAPE seeming ever present we set out at 1.30am for the 5 hour climb to the top of the mountain. These climbs tend to be done in the dark for safety reasons, as the ice and snow is packed down hard in the night time cold and the spikes of your crampons will bite in that much harder. Once the sun hits the snow it starts to soften up and that's no longer true. The down side is it's about -20 when you start and you need to be roped together in 3s (2 of us and a guide) so two of you can arrest the fall of the third one should you go off the edge of the mountain. Myself and Irish John were roped to Mario, the head guide and we later on did wonder if either of us (my 80kg and his 90kg) would be able to stop the other from falling with only Mario's 60kg and 5 feet to stop us? Mario made us feel much safer, as he oozed experience and we mostly just trudged up the snow in the dark, one foot in front of the other, feeling ever weaker from the lack of oxygen in the air.

The last part of the climb is the one you want your wits about you, as it's the only really technical part. The ridge line is about 1 or 2metres wide in most places and rises like a razors edge up to the summit. On either side is a sheer drop of over 1000m so you need to do exactly what you're told, which means very slow going when you're dizzy from the exhaustion of walking uphill for 5 hours with about a 1/3rd of the oxygen you're used to. We were very lucky to arrive at the top just as the sun was breaking over the valley and we had a clear view right over La Paz towards the higher mountain, Illimani and over Lake Titicaca to Puno in Peru and beyond. Climbing that mountain is another step in my life's journey of That's The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done, but right at that point all I could really think was "I'm so wiped. How the hell am I going to get off this thing?".

It's a gruelling downhill slog back through the snow to the bottom refuge and I do wonder if I've ever actually been that tired before in my life. On my return to La Paz I managed a mega-grande Whopper meal and about 13 hours sleep and I'm still eating like I've got tapeworm two days later.

So you find me still becalmed in La Paz. I've been to the doctor recommended by the mountain biking company, had my face x-rayed and it turns out I've certainly fractured my nose. I'm off to a specialist today, hopefully so they can do some panel beating and get my face back into shape so I can move on and do other things. Right now I'm doing one appointment a day until they decide what to do with me. I'm in a bit of a robust discussion with my travel insurance as to whether me riding a mountain bike down something labelled the World's Most Dangerous Road is covered in my policy, but so far I've spent a grand total of $25 on doctor's appointments and x-rays, so it may not even be worth claiming if it doesn't even reach my excess. I've been told one of the groups protesting over pay and hours is the doctors, and I'm starting to see why, if that's the price they extort out of the gringos, then who knows what a local doctor gets paid?

Titicaca

Copacabana :: Bolivia

Not just a funny sounding word.

Places: Puno, Uros Islands, Taquile, Copacabana & Isla del Sol.

Coolest thing I did: Watched the Cordillera Real light up at sunset with Isla del Luna in the foreground. Pity the picture has frickin' power lines in it.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: After Easy Rider Dennis Hopper made a movie in Cusco called The Last Movie that was such a flop that it made him a Hollywood pariah for somewhere over a decade.

Excuse me if this one is a bit scattered. Due to random road blockades by students/doctors/nurses/farmers (it's very hard to get an answer that doesn't seem like someone's biased opinion) no buses have managed to leave Copacabana for anywhere else in Bolivia for 3 days and that means I was relegated to the late bus when the roads finally opened, so I've been supporting the local economy by drinking beers in the sun on the shore of Lake Titicaca. I may be drunk, sunstruck or a combination of both.

As is par for the course in my travels in South America I managed to find a Nirvana cover band on my last night in Cuzco and as a result found myself fairly groggy for my bus ride to Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca when the time came to move on. I was willing to simply skip over Puno and go directly to Bolivia, however I was told it was worth doing a day there to see the floating islands of the Uros, so I found myself by late afternoon descending into what at a distance looked like a picturesque town on the shores of a gorgeous blue lake and instead found myself in a slightly tarted up slum whose sole existence is to get the last  few soles out the passing tourists before the cross the border into Bolivia. For a town that's situated on the highest navigable lake in the world, where the thin air and bright sun gives the lake an appearance like liquid saphires it defies logic that they'd try their best to keep the tourists staying in the terracotta and exposed concrete hovels up the hill and away from the lake shore. When I'm in charge, things will be different.

Puno is a town where you get on a boat and go for a day to see a couple of isolated cultures that have survived somewhat intact through a series of invasions going back to pre-Inca times. The floating islands of Uros do exactly what they say on the tin. Blessed with endless reeds in the shallow bay surrounding Puno the local people escaped their invaders by building reed islands that now resemble something of a Venice of South America. Of course, if Venice was made entirely of reeds. They start with a metre of the roots of the reeds, which hold more than their own weight when wet, then add another two metres of dry reeds, on top of which they build their houses, unsurprisingly out of reeds. They also eat reeds. If there was a sport based on finding things to do with reeds, these people would be world champions. They cook on burning reeds, but in what is probably a concession to past conflagrations they build their stoves out of clay. They are also avid non-smokers, unlike pretty much all other Bolivians, but probably for the same reason.

Tacked onto the end of the same day trip is lunch on the island of Taquile, which isn't (as some loud American college girls on the trip thought) where tequila comes from. (Come on!, these girls went to university and they still think nonsense like that...I digress). It's another indigenous refuge that has since been terraced over every surface and thanks to the Lonely Planet planting the idea in my head, is now somewhere I'm incapable of thinking of as anything different to Mediterranean. If you squint real hard you can see the Greek Islands. We had a lunch consisting of trucha (that's trout, gringo) and to a fairly embarrassing display of local customs and dancing and so forth. Am I the only one that finds these displays of nearly dead culture a little uncomfortable to watch?  I feel like the plantation master watching the native sing for their supper. But maybe that's the sunstroke talking.

So my first day in Bolivia greeted me with the most common local custom that brushes up against tourists these days: the road blockade. Bolivians love a strike, and they've discovered that road blockages are the way to get maximum impact. The bus I was on was going to La Paz via Copacabana, but on arrival to Copacabana it turns out the roads into and out of La Paz were blocked by the doctors and nurses, who were upset that they were going to be pushed to work an 8 hour day, instead of the current 6 hours. However before you judge that was just the most common of the many reasons people were speculating the roads were blocked. I also heard it was students, indigenous people (I've been recently informed in the Andes the term indio becomes offensive so I've stopped using it) protesting the building of a highway and the taxi drivers being taxi drivers. Lucky for me, my plan was to stop in Copa for a few days anyway, but today is the first day the buses are running again, so there's been people I saw on the bus two days ago finally getting out to La Paz where the hoped to be days ago.

Copa is a much nicer town than Puno, and if I only had time to do one town on the shores of Lake Titicaca this would be it. In the afternoon it faces the setting sun and the bars down on the beach are filled with Argentinian students pretending they're hippies in the 3 months they've got to grow dreadlocks before they're forced back to BA to go to Uni on they're padres' money. The poor people in Argentina aren't smoking weed on the shores of Lake Tititcaca, I'm pretty sure. Much of this is driven by the fact that the Isla del Sol was once the centre of the Inca creation myth, and as a result has sprung up all the usual mystical mumbo jumbo that goes with it - every room I've slept in for the last 3 days has been equipped with a dream catcher. I'm wondering if I could make a fortune here by starting a business based on the fact I've built a more effective dream catcher ("catches 25% more dreams or your money back!") but I suspect that's too cynical.

The Incas were a pretty smart bunch of emperors. Once they'd done conquering all the peoples of the Andes they went around co-opting the best of everything those people did, including the creation myths of the people who had previously living on the shores of Lake Titicaca. The world had been created by a mixing of Mother Earth and the Sun on the Isla del Sol, so that became the birthplace of the first Inca, and a temple was created on the north end of the island to allow the Inca to celebrate that fact, and the town of Copacabana (which the one in Brazil is named after) sprung up to support that. When you get told you're getting your boat from Copacabana beach it's a fairly different experience from doing the same thing in Rio.

You can kind of see why this happened. The Isla del Sol is beautiful. It's the peak of an underwater mountain made of tufts of grasp handing on by it's fingernails to masses of exposed rock jutting out at acute angles from the lake. I did the full circuit, spending the morning walking along the ridge tops from south to north and then winding my way back through the villages along the east coast of the island on the way back. You visit ruins that would be fairly tame had you just finished doing the Inca trail, but the piles of rocks are greatly enhanced by the perfect backdrop of cliffs plunging into perfectly blue water. The biggest highlight of staying overnight on the island was the fact the snow caps of the Cordillera Real mountain range light up pink  once the sun has gone down, with the dark expanse of the much smaller Isla del Luna in the foreground. It truly would be a magical place, even without all the hippy dippy nonsense that surrounds these kinds of places.

So I'm back in Copa now in the hope that the ticket I've been sold to La Paz is on a bus that isn't going to be cancelled due to striking teachers/doctors/environmentalists/coca growers (cross out all but one). This afternoon's bus was full due to the fact there's been people on the waiting list since Monday, but the evening bus was suspiciously empty. Hopefully the next one of these will come from La Paz, and not here where I've wasted days getting sunburnt supporting the local economy. Apparently I should do that by buying handicrafts, but I suspect they are also equally happy with money spent on beer.

7th Wonder

Cuzco :: Peru

The other Lost City of the Incas.

Places: Machu Picchu & Cuzco.

Coolest thing I did: Watched the clouds and mist slowly clear to reveal Machu Picchu, as a reward for walking for 3 days to get there.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The avocado was originally from Peru. How they failed to invent guacamole is beyond me.

Sometimes when you travel around for long enough you get a bit jaded about things having become too touristy, and being forced to say "no gracias" about once every 60 seconds or so walking around the streets of Cuzco to offers of massages, paintings and food doesn't put you in the mood for a proper adventure. However, you often forget in your cynicism that some things really do live up to the hype.

Walking for 4 days to Machu Picchu along the Inca Trail is one of those things.

Now let's be clear, since the government limited the numbers of people who walk the Inca Trail from infinity to somewhere around 120 a day the prices have risen, but so has the service. This is probably the poshest camping I've ever done in my life. Not only are you basically carrying your personal effects for the day, but an army of porters from the local area carry your tents, tents to cook and eat in, and everything else that goes in it. There's a chef that comes along, so you get fed about 5000 calories a day of really good food and the guides all speak several languages and are ridiculously knowledgeable about all things Inca. After the grunt work of carrying all our stuff in and out of Huaraz it was much, much easier.

The trek itself takes in many lesser Inca sites along the way, many cleared and reconstructed so you turn a corner and find terraces dropping down the hillsides right in front of you, or roofless fortresses sticking out of shelves carved into the cliff faces. I'll say this for the Incas: they had a flair for the dramatic in the placement of their buildings.

The second day of the trek is the only one that you would consider a serious challenge to someone of average fitness, with a 1,200m climb to 4,200m to a point called Dead Woman pass, which inevitably leads to a whole bunch of jokes directed to every woman that climbs it. However, the name comes from that fact that at a distance it looks like there is the upper half of a woman in profile sitting at the base of the pass, complete with what the guide liked to refer to as a "titty". This was also the day that one of the Brazilians in our group got hit hard to by the lack of oxygen and basically dragged himself up the hill in bits. Even with a serious hit of oxygen from the emergency supply he never really recovered enough and by the last day he was almost being carried. I'm glad even with my altitude problems at their worst I was never hit that bad.

The third day is a long one, but it involve many stops at Inca sites along the way and a very spectacular stretch through the cloud forest on the far side of the ranges as you drop down toward MP. The terrain over 4 days goes quickly from forest, to dry exposed hillside down to jungle on the other side. You've constantly reminded about how seriously the Andes divides the country and creates these micro climates, and why the Andes may well have been the only place outside Mesopotamia in modern day Iraq where man started agriculture independently.

The 4th day starts at 4am, with a climb up to the Sun Gate, the traditional first glimpse of MP that you get from the end of the Inca Trail. When we got there (basically last) pretty much everyone of all the various groups we'd seen over the previous 3 days were sitting at there, waiting for said glimpse. What we got instead was a cliff dropping into a perfect sheet of white. The sun came over the hill, shined it's rays down in the direction of MP and we were still waiting to see the damn thing. By 8am the guide decided it was unlikely to clear in the next couple of hours so we kept down the path towards our goal. It was probably almost 2/3rds of the way down before we got our first sighting of one of the New Wonders of the World.

Having seen many Inca sites on the lead up you think you're ready, but nothing really prepares you to see the huge numbers of terraces zigzagging down the hillside, overlooked by temples and living quarters and all watched over with rocky vigilance by the peak of Huayna Picchu. At first we were only getting either the citadel or the mountain not covered by cloud, so were frustrated in the goal of getting that photo that's appeared on a thousand postcards (and that you're probably already familiar with) but by mid-morning the cloud had lifted and we could see the whole thing.

And the couple of thousands of day trippers up from Cuzco or nearby Aguas Calientes. You get so used to sharing the trail with a select group who you've been meeting all along the way you get almost offended at your first site of someone else. It's amusing to see people who caught the bus up traipsing around in perfectly clean, brand new hiking gear for half a day while you smell like you've slept in your clothes for 4 days, mostly because you've been sleeping in your clothes for 4 days. By lunch time it gets almost out of control, so that you can't walk 5 metres without your way being blocked by a tour group who got there on a bus while they sit there and have facts bounce of them in about 9 different languages. I know it's something that everyone should be able to see, but at the time I strictly thought if you walked that long to get there the least they could do is limit the tour groups to an hour in the late afternoon, once I was done with the place. You get some funny thoughts.

As I was the only one in our group who had been warned, I was the only one who had bought the extra ticket to climb Huayna Picchu to get a view back over MP and all the way we'd just come since the morning. By the time I started at 11am the sun was blazing down on the side of the peak, and to be honest some of the steps came up to my waist. The whole thing would be made a little more manageable if you didn't have to stop behind really fat people who hadn't been warned that climbing hundreds of really steep steps would actually be hard, but I still managed to get up in a reasonable time for a 360 degree view over the valley below. What's even nuttier is the Incas built structures all the way up there, including terraces that I  assume were agricultural (because they all seemed to be agricultural, or retaining walls). That would have been a pain in the arse to get up there to water them.

No such problem in MP itself. There's a massive system of aqueducts that were used to irrigate the hundreds of terraces you see, and about a third of them are still working after 500 years of neglect, despite all the earthquakes and landslides since. This has led to some theories that the place was a large scale lab for cross breeding different plants to grow at altitude, as there isn't enough flat land there to feed a population the size the place probably had at it's peak. This is one of many, many facts that bounced off the front of my head that day.

So who built the place, and why? There's endless theories, but it's known that it was one of the later Inca sites, and it must have been fairly important, because when the last Inca emperor to resist Spanish rule led them on a wild goose chase out into the jungle he made damn sure to skirt MP and leave it undiscovered for centuries. They instead led them to the city of Vilacamba, some 100km away from Cuzco and had their last bloody stand there. So when the Spanish looted Vilacamba and burnt the place to the ground, MP survived nearly intact. With the notable exceptions of grave robbers, both local and foreign, they remained as such until a local farmer led the Yale professor Hiram Bingham up the hill and the first scientific discovery of the site in 1912. He had been on an expedition to find Vilacamba, the Lost City of the Incas, and assumed that with it's sheer size that Machu Picchu must have been it. He also carted off a whole crapload of Inca stuff to Yale and they remain in a museum there, much to the chagrin of the Peruvian people. In the last few years the demands for their return have rivalled those of the Greeks petitioning for the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.

The Andean people in general were crazy about lining things up for the cardinal points and having the light hit certain things during equinoxes, and that has of course led to a whole lot of mystic mumbo jumbo being speculated about the place. If I never hear another ageing American hippie talking at high volume about ley lines or the healing power of the earth it will be too soon.

Due to the high cost of the Inca Trail (due to the laws of supply and demand brought on by limiting the numbers) many people choose to do other hikes to get to MP, but I'm glad I did it the old school way. Besides MP itself, I think the highlight for me was the stretch leading up into the cloud forest, where the trail seems to disappear into the clouds themselves, with the wind occasionally clearing it long enough for you to see way down into the green valleys below. There's something otherworldly about walking through clouds that has to be experienced to be believed.

Jesus and the guinea pig

Cuzco :: Peru

A town that's more of a life support system for Machu Picchu than anything else.

Places: Cuzco.

Coolest thing I did: Took in the many buildings the Spaniards built by tearing down all the existing Inca buildings and using them as pseudo-quarries.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The pre-Colombian people of South America weren't literate like we understand, so they used big bunches of strings with knots tied in them, called quipus to record stuff. They had histories, maps and accounting information all encoded in the knots. Computer geeks dig that kind of stuff.

Even if you've never planned a trip to Peru, one of the only things you've almost certainly heard of is the jewel in the crown of pre-Colombian archaeological sites in South America; Machu Picchu. The closest town to MP is the old Inca imperial capital of Cuzco, so if you're planning a visit to MP, either on a day trip or at the end of the famous Inca Trail, you're going to spend at least a bit of time here. If you're like me, for the first time in all of Peru you're also going to get the feeling you've found somewhere spoiled by mass tourism. It's a stunningly beautiful town marred by not being able to walk the streets as a gringo without being constantly harassed by someone selling handicrafts, offering massages or trying to wedge you into their restaurant.

As I mentioned last time, I've had to spend a few idle days here acclimatising before starting the Inca Trail, so of course the first thing I did is spend Friday drinking practically no water, eating massive meals (you should have seen the mountain of fries that came with my half roast chook) and going out till the wee hours of Saturday morning. In order to prepare for altitude you should stay well hydrated, eat light meals and avoid alcohol, but man, how boring would that be?

A word of warning to anyone planning a big night out at 3600 metres above sea level - you get drunk really quick and the hangover is magnified by about 10.

I'm not sure if the indio influence is really stronger here than in the rest of the country, or whether it's just hammed up for the package tourists, but the streets here are thronged with women in traditional dress trying to sell you stuff made of alpaca wool that's usually woven into a design that contains llamas on it. For the first time in all of Peru I'm being confronted with dirty children begging and old people sitting in the gutter looking miserable. Again, I'm not sure if this is just because of the proximity of so much gringo cash but I do find it strange that you didn't encounter this kind of stuff in the north so much.

Most of the sites you visit in Cuzco are colonial structures sitting on the original Inca stonework (which was pretty sturdy), with the stones used mostly coming from the remains of Sacsayhuaman, the fortress that used to watch over Cuzco during the Inca days. The most famous of these was Qoricancha, which used to be the original Sun Temple, the holiest place in all of the Inca empire. When Pizarro was conquering Peru he once captured the Inca (emperor) and ransomed him off for a whole room full of gold and silver. Most of that was stripped off the Sun Temple and melted down by the Spaniards. When Pizarro took control of Cuzco for good he left his brother in charge, who donated the temple and grounds to the Dominicans, who pretty much tore it down and built a church and monastery on the foundations. Some of the original temple has recently been rebuilt inside, using descriptions provided by the early Spanish conquistadors (they wrote quite a few books on the Incas) but most of the stone is now being used elsewhere.

The main cathedral is a object study in how the native religions were co-opted into Catholicism. There is a famous painting of the last supper next to the main alter which shows Jesus and his boys chowing down on some cuy (guinea pig) and most of the pictures of Mary are basically a white woman's head superimposed on the body of Pachamama, the earth goddess. It was through this process that the Spanish managed to convert the natives to Catholicism. The patron of the city is also housed in the cathedral, Senor de los Temblores (lord of the earthquakes), a large wooden statue of a crucified Jesus that gets paraded around the town at Easter. The name alone should tell you the locals are fairly pre-occupied with the fact their city is knocked over and needs to be rebuilt every 50 years or so. The cathedral is full of holy iconography, a lot of it far more spectacular than the stuff in Lima, and in another nod to pre-Colombian traditions the Peruvians like their Jesus bloody. You get used to seeing the clean, sanitised European art of the Passion of Christ back on the old continent, but the indios were ever going to believe a man with nails driven through his hands  and feet was going to end up with a couple of neat blood spots on each wrist. These people used to sacrifice humans, after all. Much like Qoricancha, the cathedral was built on the site of the Inca's palace and used up all the stone that said palace used to consist of. All of this stuff shows just how brutal the Spanish conquest was and how the large percentage of the population who pretty much still look like they did in Inca times is able to retain a grudge against the white people who rule them from Lima.

So I've had my briefing and been given a lovely yellow t-shirt stating I survived the Inca Trail (I wonder if I have to give it back if I don't survive?) and tomorrow morning I'm finally getting started.

All watched over by volcanoes

Arequipa :: Peru

Also, Juanita the Ice maiden.

Places: Arequipa, Chivay, Cabanaconde, Cruz del Condor & the Colca Canyon.

Coolest thing I did: Hiked up the Colca  Canyon starting in the dark, with the sun revealing snowcaps and sheer cliffs all around as the climb progressed.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The sap of an actual aloe vera cactus smells like beef. Why has no-one marketed beef scented skin products to men?

It wasn't until the last day in Arequipa I had a day clear enough to realise that these people live cheek to jowl with three fairly mean looking active volcanoes. Getting up this morning I was greeted by a perfect autumn morning that allowed me for the first time to make out the perfect cone of El Misti right behind the twin spires of the main cathedral and the mangled peak of Chachani off to it's right. There have been people growing stuff in the fertile volcanic earth around the city since at least the time of the Incas, but like most places in the world where the town is juxtaposed directly with a mountain or two that likes to spew hot ash every now and then (apparently the last time it happened here the ash blew over the town for a mere 8 years or so) you wonder if this is a really good long-term survival strategy.

I'm in Arequipa today when I should be camped out at El Misti's base camp at 4800 metres because it seems that it's again really hard to organise stuff as a solo traveller in Peru. Every travel agency in town offers treks to the Colca Canyon but pooling enough people together to want to climb a volcano together seems to be beyond their powers. I had been told I'd be able to go up with a trio of American lads who ended up being on my tour to the Colca Canyon, but it turns out one of them wasn't fit enough for the mild 2 hour climb out of the canyon so they decided the 5 hour climb from the base camp of El Misti to the summit at 5825m starting at 1am was a bit much. So despite my best efforts to find another group going on the only free two days I have left before I have to be in Cusco to prepare for the Inca Trail, it looks like I won't be doing it on this trip. Which got me down, before I remembered I'd never even heard of El Misti a week ago and vaguely had even heard of Arequipa.

The reason most people come to Arequipa, besides to take pictures of old, white building is to go on a trek into the Colca Canyon, by a whisker the second deepest canyon anywhere in the world. I elected to do it over three days instead of two, which most people are into.

The first stop is always the Cruz del Condor, one of the best places in the canyon to see the giant Andean Condors at work. After a 3am wake-up and 5 hours in a minibus we were very lucky to see a condor perched right below the road the second the bus pulled up next to the 25 or so other minibuses that were already there, and managed to see not only condors gliding effortlessly up in the high air currents of the canyon, but also many acts of high dickheadery by tourists looking for a better photo. Seriously, if there are fences next to a several hundred metre drop you probably don't want to climb over them.

The first day had drop all the way down into the canyon to the river below, then climb not too far to the village the two dayers have lunch at, which gave us ample time for our guide, from the nearby village to show us every plant in the area had some use to the locals, be it to eat (man, did I eat a lot of figs that afternoon), use as medicine, glue & quite awesomely, parasites that live in cactus that people in Lima will pay by the kilo for to be turned into organic lipstick. I'm always a bit sceptical of some of the magical claims ascribed to some of the plants, but in this part of the world tradition a folk lore will trump a double blind clinical trial any day of the week.

It was also quite lucky for our guide that she was so close to her parents home, as she tore her pants and was able to climb through her Mum's window (she wasn't home) and get another pair.

The second day takes you back down the gorge to Sangalle, which used to be some pools to swim in that has been turned into a full resort town. Each of the groups of bungalows has a concrete pool, usually with a single wall made of a massive natural rock that was too hard to move that are fed from the waterfall up the valley so the water circulates through and is constantly clean. On the way we only stopped to try some chicha, a beer made of fermented corn that is common all along the Andes. I'd tried it's unsweetened version in Colombia, but gave up trying to get drunk on it after three cups (that one was 2% ABV), however we were promised the Peruvian version was much better, as it was fermented longer for more punch. However, being chock full of sugar it was hard to tell, and I was pretty happy to only go through one cup, it being so sickly sweet I could have had a little vomit.

So Sangalle was good to us, giving us a lazy, sunny afternoon to go swimming, drink room temperature beer (the real stuff, not chicha) and talk nonsense amongst ourselves. As the two day trek sleeps in the same place we got a whole influx of people arriving just as the sun was setting and the rain started. While doing the whole thing over three days goes at a pretty lazy pace, you do get a bit more time to yourself, which is good for someone as allergic to organised tours as I am.

The best part for me was starting at 5am in the dark back up the mountain to arrive back in the hamlet of Cabanaconde as it was probably the only part of the trek that really made you work, with several hundred metres to climb before breakfast. As the light slowly starts to hit the valley you can make out the multicoloured cliffs on all sides starting to poke through the clouds and mist that will clear throughout the morning. In the distance you get the sunrise striking the snowcaps of nearby volcanoes in the background and the snow and clouds both reflect dawns golden hues.

Due to the altitude issues of my early days in Huaraz I thought it better to go at a constant, steady pace and do the projected 3 hour climb in about 2 hours. Along the way I graciously stepped aside to let a group of young guys, Americans and Brits from the accent pass as they were obviously in a hurry. However it became fairly obvious that 3 of the 5 were going way too fast, with me overtaking them every 10 mins or so as they panted on the corner of a switchback, only to have them charge past me again on the way up. It turns out that these were the guys my hostel had organised for me to climb El Misti with later in the week, but at the time I didn't realise I was watching that trip fade in their youthful inability to pace themselves. This I can forgive, but one of the rest of their group kind of ruined my morning.

On my arrival to the top, possibly the 5th or 6th person up I was able to get a full panorama of the valley as the sun was just starting to pierce down into the depths of the river at the bottom, something that would have been awe inspiring to behold in contemplative silence. Instead I got the sound of an Oxbridge accent trumpeting his sheer awesomeness of being the first up the mountain and how the woman at the top who was selling food and drinks gave him a free banana as a reward. It would have been cool if it stopped there, but I had to listen to this tale retold to everyone one of the 60 or so people who reached the lip of the canyon, and his constant update on how long he'd been waiting at the top. A big part of me wished I'd gone up at full pace, just so I could have beaten him and sat there without saying a word, just to take away his ability to continue to expound on his hill climbing and banana receiving talents, but then you have to remind yourself that some people are just dicks, and are best ignored.

An hour in some hot springs and a full buffet lunch restored my good humour and despite the lookout at the high pass back to Arequipa being pointless to stop at, due to the clouds reaching right to the lip of the valley below it was a fairly pleasant ride back to town. The sun was well and truly out and it was possible to make out the agricultural terraces that made these valleys farmable all along every steep surface it was feasible to carve them in.

The people around Arequipa are probably as close to the stereotypical descendants of the Andean natives as it's possible to imagine, with all of them being short, broad and able to function quite well on a 1/3rd of the oxygen the rest of us usually deal with. Like most of the Latin American countries there is still a very stark divide in the visual appearance of the taller, light skinned European descendants that people the better parts of Lima and the natives that live in the rest of the country, and unlike Lima, Arequipa is small enough for you to pass the mass slums that have built up around it since the large scale migration of rural people into the cities started as agricultural productivity has risen since the 1960s. However, the divide in Peru feels far more stark than it did in any of the other countries I've visited (with the possible exception of Mexico) and that has been a constant tension pretty much since the time of Pizarro.

Over the years the indios have risen up various times, but the most recent and violent of those uprising has scarred much of Peru's modern history. Much like the FARC in Colombia or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the victory of Fidel Castro's communists in Cuba inspired a local professor of philosophy, Abimael Guzman to start an armed revolution that would come pretty close to civil war territory in the 1980s and early 90s. Due to long standing divisions in Peruvian society it became fairly easy for his group, Shining Path to recruit young people in the poor rural areas of the Andean foothills to their cause and despite their dwindling power since Guzman's arrest in 1992 they managed to shape much of the modern politics since. The President who brought the Shining Path to heel, Alberto Fujimori did manage to restore the country to some sort of order, but he was later convicted of crimes against humanity and corruption, mostly due to his involvement with directing extra-judicial killings by right-wing death squads who had been given carte blanche to do whatever they needed to to bring down the Shining Path. Latin American history across the whole continent has depressingly familiar themes.

So my Inca Trail deadline is approaching fast, and I can't really think of enough stuff to do to justify another day in Arequipa so it's off to Cusco tonight on the night bus. I did manage to spend some time today seeing another of the ice mummies the Inca left on the mountain tops as a sacrifice to stop things like El Nino (the other I saw was in Salta in Argentina). Juanita, the Ice maiden was found on top of a volcano near Arequipa but due to the fact she'd slid down the crater sometime in the last 500 years her face is severely damaged but you can still make out the wrinkles in her skin and the colour of her fingernails on the parts of her that remained hidden from the elements. Despite the guide telling us there were no other ice mummies on display anywhere in South America (hmmm...) it was just as creepy to see a girl 500 years old so perfectly preserved again. It did also take up a whole hour of my day, between breakfast and a surprisingly good cerviche for lunch, mostly because we're so far from the sea you'd not think much of fish steamed in lime juice and chilli.

The next one of these I write should come after I've seen Machu Piccu, only the second of the New Seven Wonders of the World I get to see on this trip!