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!

Snowboards & Spacemen

Arequipa :: Peru

Moving fast with my first deadline in ages looming.

Places: Huacachina, Nazca & Arequipa.

Coolest thing I did: Flew over the highly mysterious Nazca lines in a tiny little light plane.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The strangely yellow Inca Cola has about the same amount of caffeine as Coca Cola. That would explain why it's done nothing for my sleep when I've replaced one with the other.

I'm being repeatedly amazed by just how different the scenery is in different parts of Peru. After a night bus got me to Lima from Huaraz just in time to change buses to Ica I already felt overdressed for the heat. Arriving in Ica, the pivot town that gets you to my goal of Huacachina I felt the change even more readily, the fact being there's a 500m high sand dune right in the middle of the city. Once you get away from the Andes the coastal region of southern Peru turns pretty quickly into ultra dry desert, and the reason you'd keep going to Huacachina rather than Ica is it's an oasis that kind of sits at suburban distance from the main town itself, and as a result is chock full of tourist goodness.

Huacachina is a briny green pool you'd think more than twice about swimming in surrounded by massive sand dunes, and it's those sand dunes that attract most of the backpackers who want to slide down them on boards. Unlike the time I did this in Floripa in Brazil, the sand dunes are high enough in places to be way too painful to walk up, so you go at sunset in a 9 person dune buggy out into the dunes and ride down a progressively more scary array of sand walls. I decided that I'd try my hand at doing it with an actual snowboard (complete with boots and bindings) instead of the sand board, and very quickly remembered why you do your best to find boots that fit properly and bindings that make good contact with the board. Due to having a shoe size basically unknown to anyone but giants of legend in Peru I was forced to wear boots two sizes too big, which were designed for old-school step-in bindings, so the contact with the board was non-existent. Add to this the fact I haven't been on an actual snowboard in somewhere approaching 5 years and I was destined to eat a fair bit of sand on the way down.

The first dune would have counted as a short blue run and my attempt to make a toe turn resulted in me face first practically every time. I managed to ride the second one (which would have been a long blue at a ski resort) without turning once, which solved the problem for a bit, but the last two drops were massive and steep. The penultimate ride was basically me going down on my heels, falling over on my toes, repeat about half a dozen times, which wasn't much fun. The last drop was really, really scary but I managed it by basically starting on my toes and doing it in one really long toe turn. It was very cool to be able to do it all without having to climb up hills, but I suspect I probably could have had just as much fun on the actual sandboards, which most people rode flat on their bellies face first.

For me the best part was riding around in the dune buggy, as the driver did his utmost to treat us like we were in a roller coaster. Hitting the lips of the dunes at full speed makes for excellent jumps, and he had absolutely no fear of just pointing the nose straight down and letting gravity do the rest. Add to this the sunset over the dunes and the view back into town were breathtaking and even with the bad equipment the day out was well worth it.

Which was good, because despite their best efforts to milk the place there isn't a whole lot to do in a desert oasis except be hot. You can wander around the whole of Huacachina in something like 3 minutes. Bring a good book.

So due to the fact I'm running into a deadline to be in Cusco two days before I start the Inca Trail (otherwise they say they won't take my money and let my spot go empty - something tells me they'll take the money anyway...) I decided to take the next afternoon bus to Nazca and try and see the Nazca lines in the morning before heading off to Arequipa in the afternoon. I'm glad I did this, because much like Huacachina, Nazca is a one-trick pony.

What are the Nazca lines? Despite Speilberg's best efforts to wind them into the recent Indiana Jones movie,  no-one really knows. It seems like the Nazca people (who were top dogs in this part of Peru up until they were taken over by the war-like Wari in about 600AD) decided to make these huge glyphs on the desert flood by turning over the rocks in lines and then letting the desert preserve them (it really doesn't rain much in Nazca if the lines are still there 1400 years later). They're in the shape of things like monkeys, dogs and birds, but the one everyone likes is called the 'Astronaut', to take into account many a nutjob has decided that the anthropomorphic figure set out on one of the hillsides could only have been an alien. That goes into the deeper question of why the Nazca decided to draw these lines that could only be seen from the air, with being-used-to-signal-aliens being only one of the wackier theories, but the truth is no-one really knows, as the Nazca weren't literate and didn't leave a whole lot of other remains to give clues. There are some irrigation ditches and aqueducts, but none of those seems to suggest a reason for the lines.

The area has been pretty steadily populated for thousands of years so it was a total surprise when someone flew over the desert at Nazca in the 1930s and saw the lines for what they were for the first time. This is still the best way to see the lines, and as a result there is a minor airforce of light planes at the Nazca airfield waiting to take tourists up for a 30 minute flight over the lines. I actually thought that was a pretty cool way of doing it, with the pilot and co-pilot taking it in turns to wheel the plane over the glyphs so each side of the plane gets to take pictures and they spend more time pointing out the lines than paying attention to how level the plane is. Of our flight of 5 people that did, unfortunately make one of the girls sick as a dog and we had to spend most of the flight with a strong whiff of vomit emanating through the plane. The pilot was pretty quick to open the windows the second we were landed again.

So from Nazca it was a nice ride along the coast until sunset, taking in the long waves off shore and the close mountains in the desert above the road. By the time I rocked into Arequipa at 1am the temperature had most definitely dropped and I assumed I was in for another cold town, much like Huaraz.

Waking up on Sunday morning however showed me I was wrong. I've been walking around in a t-shirt all day, ever since I stumbled out looking for breakfast at about 9am. I turns out there was the Peruvian equivalent of Anzac Day going on, so I sat on a balcony above the main square to breakfast and watched people with uniforms and guns do some marching and yelling. The rest of my day was mostly devoted to taking pictures of white buildings, which there are a lot of, and going to the local convent, which is a city within a city. The Santa Catalina Convent was founded not too long after Arequipa itself and was a closed area to everyone but nuns until the 1970s. As most of the nuns came from aristocratic backgrounds they lived in pretty good style, with massive cells, orchards and large courtyards to go about doing nun-ley things in. I especially liked the massive sign calling for 'silenco' on entering, because lets face it: who likes a mouthy nun? I had thought I was fairly churched out, but the area covered by the convent is the size of a small village and the bright colours offset each other very well, making the whole place very photogenic. If, of course, you like your photos full of fat German daytrippers, like all mine seem to be. The only downside is the reason the colours seem so bright is because they were very wet when I was there, and my daypack now has a nice rusty hue to it. Bloody nuns, can't trust 'em.

So towering over Arequipa are three volcanoes, one of which I'd really like to try my hand at climbing. I've spoken to people who have climbed El Misti as recently as a week ago, but I have had some trouble finding someone reputable who will ensure I can actually climb it overnight Thursday. Right now I've spent a bit too much time at sea level so I'm off to the Colca Canyon for 3 days in order to get some more time at altitude and due to the fact I have to be in Cusco by the weekend I'm really running out of days. If one of them has to go, then I'm obviously not going to climb El Misti instead of the Inca trail, but it has been frustratingly hard to organise anything with a guarantee of leaving on the day you are told you will be in Peru. I don't know if it's just the off season, but even doing the most popular things in Peru seems to involve a lot of wasted days of waiting around. I'm guessing Bolivia won't exactly be more organised, but it surprises me that places so reliant on tourists can't get this kind of thing right. When I'm in charge, things will be different.

So we're down to the last 6 weeks, and all going well I know exactly what I'm doing for about the next fortnight. I can feel Santiago and June creeping up on me now.

Glimpses of beauty

Huaraz :: Peru

Living life without oxygen.

Places: Huaraz, Chavin de Huantar, the Cordillera Blanca & Vaqueria.

Coolest thing I did: The bus ride up to Vaqueria rises up to a mountain pass at 4900 metres and the view was so good you basically stuck your camera out the window, pressed the button at random times and got postcards.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The term "National Park" in Peru seems to mean "comes with cows".

Huaraz is a nice little town nestled in between the very impressive Cordillera Blanca and the slightly less impressive Cordillera Negra mountain ranges (translation: The White Mountains and The Black Mountains. About Australian levels of originality in naming things in Peru then...)

and after about 4 days here I was ready to punch someone. I came here on the recommendation of a few people I travelled with early on in my trip with the express purpose of doing the 4 day Santa Cruz trek and was quite willing to pay for a guided tour. So after waiting 3 days for a group to leave I was told at 6:30 in the morning that my trek was cancelled, but it would leave tomorrow. So I waited another whole day and the night before, again they cancelled. It was then very lucky that James (who I did all of Patagonia with early on showed up in town and after doing the Inca trail and thinking it was way too soft to have donkeys carry all your stuff was determined to hire gear and do it all himself. If 4 days of carrying all our camping stuff and food sounded a bit easy, he had also decided to tack the Lago 69 trek (usually done as a day trip out of Huaraz) onto the start to make it 5 days worth of food and about 15kg each on setting out.

After a stupidly early 5am start, a taxi and two collectivos (minibuses) we found ourselves with all the day trippers standing in a cloud covered valley full of cows. For some reason the term National Park seems to not preclude people's livestock roaming free all over the place. This means after a few days you stop noticing you're walking in cow poo, setting up your tent in cow poo, sitting in cow poo etc. If you've ever been camping and thought "this whole thing could be made a heap better if there was only shit everywhere" then Peruvian national parks are for you! Despite this we set off carrying our full packs on a hike that included a climb from 3600 metres to a truly beautiful alpine lake at 4400 metres.

Having done Torres del Paine with James we knew I tended to charge off ahead so by the time we dumped our packs 3 hours later at a height of 4200 metres I'd probably been a good 45 mins ahead of him. I'd felt my heart beating well above normal pace for that level of effort and being honest I'd never really tried this kind of hiking at altitude before. The last 200 metres to the lake absolutely killed me and by the time we got to the lake I felt like I was having my worst ever hangover x10, with a massive headache and queasiness. I attempted to plough through lunch at the lake but was really feeling terrible. It seems like a lot of people who do a fair bit of endurance exercise I'm pretty susceptible to altitude sickness - which amongst the mountaineering fraternity is a bit like admitting you're a premature ejaculator. I'm not sure if it's just we've got too much ego and get sick by going out too hard too early, or whether exercising a lot at sea level makes changes to your body that don't work very well at altitude. All I do know is it was very annoying to see chain smokers having an easier time of it than I was.

We cooked pasta up for lunch and spent a lot of time trying to fight off the two cows that were constantly bugging us for food and during that time all the day tripping groups came and went with the ridges behind the lake totally covered in thick cloud. It was only when we were packing up the clouds cleared for half an hour to show two massive snow caps behind the lake, making it postcard perfect. Chalk up one to James for wanting to not do a day trip - that lake was possibly one of the most impressive I saw in all of South America.

We camped back down near the road at 3600 metres in pouring rain but luckily the next morning I felt good again when we hooked up with our collectivo to take us up the road to the next town, Vaqueria. This involved an hour and a half drive through a pass at 4900 metres (the highest I've ever been in my life) and we were blessed with a perfectly clear morning. The winding switchback road up the side of the mountain gave us incredible views of Huascaran, the highest mountain in Peru and simply sticking your camera out the window and pressing the button at random gave you some of the best pictures I took on the whole trip. This was lucky as on the way back the road was covered in fog and we would have missed everything.

The Santa Cruz trek used to be a 4 day trek through the Santa Cruz valley up to the Punta Union pass at 4760 and then back down to the village of Vaqueria, taking you through two of the most spectacular valleys in the national park. However about the middle of March this year there was a massive mudslide that covered the first two days of the trek in waist deep mud and it's since been impossible to do the original trek. So instead you start off in Vaqueria and spend two days getting over Punta Union, camp down the bottom and then do the whole thing in reverse, which still takes in both valleys but obviously misses out most of the first one. Unfortunately too is the fact Punta Union is much harder to climb to from the side you currently do under the current trek than under the old one.

Generally speaking we were walking unaware of the mountain ranges around us, as cloud or fog was covering them most of the time, but that made it a bit more special when the cloud did clear to show us the jagged white caps of the biggest mountains of the range. I've seen pictures of what it looks like in June, but you have to work with the conditions you're given and I think we were pretty lucky to see what we did during this time of year.

The second day is a 900 metre climb from the first night's camp site to Punta Union and that 5 and a half hours, even though I was doing it slowly to avoid a repeat of feeling as bad as a I did a couple of days before is probably the hardest thing I've ever done. You simply aren't prepared for how hard it is to climb that high carrying (at that point) 12kg on your back with what feels like air so thin you're getting nothing from busting your lungs breathing. I was literally stopping every 4 or 5 steps for the last 200 metres or so and was in bits by the time I reached the tiny notch between the mountains at the top. Still, if you're travelling this long and you aren't occasionally saying "this is the hardest thing I've ever done" then you aren't doing it properly. For that matter, you could apply that to your life in general.

We had lunch at the pass and once again we were lucky to have clear views over both valleys during the hour or so we spent up there. We could see just how much of the other valley was covered in mud and with the weather closing in by the time we came to leave we made a call to drop back down the side we'd just come from and cut a day out of the trip. Neither of us could really see the point of going down the other side to camp for a night and then kill ourselves coming back up the same pass the next morning. We went down to a flat area near a lake at 4400 metres and slept there, under what turned out to be a light dusting of snow. It turns out it's actually very hard to sleep at that kind of altitude, you can feel your heart racing even when you're lying still in your sleeping bag. At least I was free of major symptoms of altitude sickness, but my appetite wasn't great. We'd been chewing coca leaves all day, which do act as an appetite suppressant so perhaps that was part of it.

Despite it's unpopularity with the DEA, the indios of the Andes have been growing and chewing coca leaves since time immemorial. There's statues of the gods chewing coca going back as old as pottery in the Andes and it was it's ubiquity and obvious positive effects on people operating at high altitude that caused Western chemists to first extract the active ingredient, the cocaine alkaloid in the late 19th century. Due to the fact you need about a kilo of leaves to make a gram of cocaine hydrochloride (the stuff you'd confiscate of Paris Hilton) you can pretty much buy the leaves here in the petrol station if you want if it's in the kind of quantity you can carry around with you all day. You masticate it your cheek between the teeth and the gum and add a little bit of lime (because it's an alkaline) and you soon feel a slight numbing sensation and find walking and climbing a little bit easier. Those of you that work in investment banks won't have to worry either - it's such a small dosage that you could chew it at your desk all day and your wee would still be clean at bonus time.

So having seen some awesome views in patches we pushed back to Vaqueria by mid afternoon in the hope of snagging a ride back to the Real World that afternoon. By 6pm it was obvious that wasn't going to happen, as we saw one car and two trucks pass in 3 hours and they were all full. So the woman who owned the only restaurant in town (which was basically a room with a table she served from her own kitchen upstairs) let us sleep in a couple of beds they have in the store room behind the shop. Which didn't have any doors. Still, after 3 solid nights of sleeping on the ground beds were a welcome sight and she fed us dinner and breakfast for about $8 all up. Vaqueria had about 8 houses so our predicament caused a bit of amusement, with the locals sitting around watching us sit around waiting for buses that were never going to come. Still, they were all very nice. I also got up fairly early to a clear morning and managed to get some nice photos of the craggy snow caps behind the town. It was also possible to dry my shoes for the first time since we started, which meant they stank slightly less when we got our collectivo at midday.

On the return to Huaraz we decided to celebrate by going and having a curry at the most westernised restaurant in town (Chilli Heaven - owned by possibly the most sour Scottish bastard in the world), and being foolish enough to have the Vindaloo my guts are an absolute mess today. We also decided to get a taxi out to the 9 month old local microbrewery, Sierra Andina and try our hand at high altitude drinking. Owned by two Yanks from Colorado (which has a fairly hectic microbrewery scene of it's own) with visa issues that are currently keeping them out of the country, Sierra Andina beer has pretty much infiltrated every place you can eat and drink in Huaraz, pushing out the local mass produced drops. It turns out they make a passable stout and very nice pale and amber ales, but due to some of Peru's laws about beer it's really hard to say how strong they are. You can't sell beer with an ABV of 6% in Peru, so three of the four beers on the menu were suspiciously 5.9%. I admit to being fairly unsteady when we wandered out at midnight, two hours after the official closing time.

So after 5 days in the rain I wake up this morning to find absolutely glorious sunshine and the hostel window giving out onto the best view of the Cordillera Blanca I've seen during the week or so I've spent here. Put that in the dictionary under Murphey's Law.

My only other trip out of town while I was trying to get the trekking organised was to one of Peru's most important archelogical sites, Chavin de Huantar. The Chavin culture existed at about the same time as the Greeks were at their peak in the Classical period, thus being as far from the Inca Empire and the Spanish conquistadors as we are from the Vikings. They were credited as the people who brought the various strands of Andean culture together for the first time, combining a lot of the agricultural and religious motifs that wouldn't have been too unfamiliar to the Incas. Their religious and cultural centre was at Chavin de Huantar, and what remains these days is the base of a pyramid looking out over multiple levels of plaza and some underground tunnels where the priests prepared the various ceremonies.

Most of the artefacts excavated from Chavin had been sitting in the museum in Lima until the local government got their act together and build a museum near the ruins, opening it in 2008. The building has taken a fair bit of inspiration from Chavin de Huantar itself, but also looks like it could have come from the pen of Frank Lloyd Wright, with big flat stone slabs blending seamlessly into the hillside behind. If I'm honest I think I was more impressed with the building that I was with what was in it. It is the current location of the Tello Obelisk, considered one of the best artefacts that still survived the Chavin people. It's such an intricately carved pattern of jaguars, felines and so forth I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before the young, hipper Peruvian kids of Lima start sporting tattoos based on it (if they aren't already).

So despite a false start I too would now highly recommend Huaraz and surrounds to anyone making their way through Peru. Despite being fairly famous it seems to have escaped the most common of the Facebook generation's Gringo Trail, so most of the people wearing North Face clothing you see in town tend to be my age or older. Most of the kids I'd spoken to in Lima had no idea what I was talking about when I said I wanted to come here and that gives the place a very laid back pace of life. Tomorrow I make my way back through Lima to Huacachina, a town in the desert known primarily for sandboarding, so I suspect the party atmosphere will be in full swing when I get there.

Heaps holy

Huaraz :: Peru

A whole lot of hard core Catholicism going on.

Places: Lima & Huaraz.

Coolest thing I did: Accidentally discovered that Good Friday is much bigger than Easter Sunday here and managed to see all the churches at peak usage.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Lima has some fairly good surf beaches right in the city. Unfortunately lots of surfers were coming out tangled in plastic shopping bags and such like.

Lima surprised me. I'd been warned by many people who passed through it recently that it's a bit down at heel and full of poor people, but with the centre of gravity of the hostels being based in the swish Miraflores district I didn't really get that feeling at all. The taxi from the airport took me along the coast, which goes quickly from massive docklands to piles of concrete and garbage that most afternoons you can see being added to by dump trucks. However you follow the lower road (at the bottom of massive cliffs) along for a while that that gives way into a series of stony beaches with really long lines of waves coming in cleanly, and about a million surfers trying to take advantage of them. There was one that I was watching out the taxi window who managed to track along the same wave for something like 30 seconds. Unfortunately there is also a lot of evidence that garbage does get dumped directly into the water.

I know Lima must have the same poor districts surrounding it that every other Latin American city seems to have (a result of the rise in farm productivity meaning a massive migration of poor country people to the cities) but I didn't really see any of them during the 3 days I was there. Miraflores could be any of the richer areas of the Colombian cities, including possibly the world's most well situated shopping centre. The LarcoMar mall is built right into the cliff face that faces out over the Pacific, so you can drink your Starbucks latte that costs what most people make here a week and get a lovely view out at surfers showing themselves incapable of lining up for waves and smashing into each other.

So I arrived in Thursday night and took the Mexican bartender's advice in the hostel to try and get out, as Good Friday was probably going to be fairly tame. I went to a place called Help, which only opens once a week and is pretty much full of Peruvians trying to acquire gingos, and thus visas. I nearly missed it however, as the taxi industry here seems to be totally unregulated and the bloke who was sitting in the car with "taxi" written on it obviously had little idea where he was going. On the way home it took 10 mins, on the way there, an hour as we slowly circled in on the place with the driver stopping at every policeman to ask for directions. At least it's all negotiated before you start, with meters being non-existent, but it would have been nice to have gotten there before the line got around the block.

So knowing I had limited time, and not knowing exactly what would be open after Easter I took the brand new bus service (which has stations like a train and it's own bus lanes - same as in Bogota) to the downtown core. I was again surprised at just how clean and ordered everything was there, but I'm wondering if there had been a big spruce up for Easter. The main square is dominated on one side by the cathedral and the whole place was packed with people who couldn't fit into the building for one of six masses of the day, so we could hear the story of Jesus y Maria over loud speakers. There's some tradition involving palm leaves woven into little fans I don't really understand, but it seems like you go around each church and touch the statues and icons with it, and cross yourself a lot. They also dress up all the statues of Jesus and the saints in purple robes for the big day, which I'm told is something that carried over from the indigenous religions that were co-opted by the Catholic church. When the Inca Empire was conquered by the Spanish the Indios were so impressed by how big the victory was they just assumed that the Spanish had better Gods, so pretty much started worshipping them alongside the old Gods.

It's fairly easy to see why they would have been impressed. A bloke called Francisco Pizarro came to Peru on this 3rd attempt with about 150 men and managed to capture the Inca emperor, ransom him off for a room full of gold and then kill him anyway. This led to the initial total capitulation of an empire spreading from southern Colombia to northern Chile and Argentina, mostly because the Andean world-view of the time was totally smashed by this little party of white blokes showing up and killing their incarnate God-king. It sucks when that happens.

My other big cultural outing was to the neighbourhood of Pueblo Libre, which hosts most of the cities museums and is not yet integrated into the new bus system. I went to the private Museo Larco, and the far less impressive Museo de Arqueologico which are a few blocks apart and led me to walking through the ultra flat, wide streets that strangely reminded me of Downtown LA, with all it's short buildings and car centric amenities. However that makes perfect sense when you realise they're both in really active earthquake zones and the buildings probably have a habit of falling over in the same way if you build them too tall.

So the Museo Larco is the work of a private family of collectors who set up their finds in an old Vice-Royal mansion and have done a much better job than the poorly funded official Museo de Arqueologico nearby. It's a good way to see stuff from all those ruins I expect to be traipsing through over the next few weeks, and unlike the MdA all the cards are translated into English so you know what you're looking at (the very few translations in the MdA are pretty funny due to Google-translate levels of accuracy but not that informative). Taking in a massive sweep of the pre-Colombian cultures (the Inca only being the last in a long line) the highlight for most people is the porno pottery, which is kept in a separate room in the garden from the rest. Basically every way that humans, animals or some mix of can copulate is depicted somewhere in the gallery, and rather disturbingly there's also a fair bit of mating between skeletons, who represent the dead. This was all made complete for me by the group of US collage-aged girls there on a school trip giggling uncontrollably, their unimpressed looking teacher and their deeply reddening local guide.

One of the better documented cultures in the collection were the Moche, who held sway over the North Coast of Peru about the same time as the Roman Empire were reaching their peak in Europe. They're interesting because they were a fairly blood-thirsty bunch, who took human sacrifice to a new level. Andean cultures have always had a bit of a problem with earthquakes and the El Nino cycle, which with short lifespans and poor science they could not have accurately predicted, so the priests built up stories about the gods being angry and demanded sacrifices to restore the natural order. This repeats itself in all the El Nino exposed cultures from Mexico down to Chile, and each one has had it's own way of dealing with it. Or sometimes not. The collapse of each empire tends to coincide with an El Nino period and elevated levels of war and human sacrifice.

In the Andean world view human sacrifice was more powerful an incentive for the Gods to stop messing everyone about than animal sacrifice, and due to the caste system the higher up the food chain the people being sacrificed were, the more powerful the results. Of course, the priests were never going to say "hey, let's sacrifice a priest!" and it was probably a career limiting move to suggest sacrificing the nobility so the Moche priests decided that the warrior caste could fight it out, in probably one of the most practical examples of applied Darwinism in human history. They'd pick a couple of high caste warriors who would engage in ritual combat with clubs until one of them managed to get the other one's helmet off and grab a fistful of his hair. The loser had his throat cut ceremonially after that, so you were left with a stronger warrior caste and hopefully some happier Gods. It probably also made for very good viewing in the days before TV.

Not really wanting to spend a whole lot more of this trip in cities I took an overnight bus on Easter Sunday to the town of Huaraz, about 8 hours north of Lima with the intention of doing some trekking in Cordillera Blanca range, which has come highly recommended by everyone who has been through this part of Peru I've spoken to. It's the first time since Argentina at high altitude (the town lies at just over 3000m) and I'm feeling a little out of breath. I'm taking it pretty easy, due to me foolishly ignoring all advice and having a massive Saturday night out in Lima (it was someone who I'd never met like an hour earlier's birthday, so how could I refuse) and then backing it up by playing drinking games before my night bus. I'm hoping that I have a hangover and not altitude sickness, but only a good night's sleep will tell. The advice on avoiding it is don't drink too much, drink lots of water and be well rested, none of which I managed to do.

A little bit jittery

Bogota :: Colombia

A cursed city, and coffee.

Places: Manizales, Salento, Cocora Valley & Bogota.

Coolest thing I did: Spent the evening playing tejo for real with the fine bunch of kids I went walking down the Cocora Valley earlier in the day.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Chiquita banana company got in big trouble for paying off both left-wing guerillas and right wing paramilitaries in the 1990s and 2000s to leave their bananas alone.

My trip to the coffee growing region of Colombia didn't start out very well. Due to a flight delay I arrived in Manizales wearing a t-shirt and shorts only to find the overnight temperature was below 18 and the airline decided not to bring my bag. That put off my going to Nevado del Ruiz, a snow capped volcano you can see from town, mostly because I had no clothes. So I decided to go the next day, but that night I got food poisoning, and just to add to the gayness all trips up the volcano were cancelled until further notice due to their being too much 'sulfur' and 'poison' in the air. I've decided that Manizales was cursed. There is no other logical explanation.

However, for a cursed city, Manizales is in an amazingly beautiful location. The main street of the city runs right along the highest ridge-line available and as you walk along it you can see the city sliding off down into the valleys on either side. I was particularly blessed that when I got to the hostel in a foul mood (due to my lack of bag) the guy at reception stopped checking me in so we could take a photo of Nevado del Ruiz behind the city skyline at sunset. He said he hadn't seen that since January, so that was kind of cool. Out in all directions are beautiful valleys where this countries second most profitable cash crop, coffee is grown.

There isn't that much to see in the city itself if I'm honest, the best bits are looking away from it from the natural vantage point the city happens to give you. Due it being a highly active earthquake zone (volcanoes tend to be a give away of that kind of thing) the cathedral is only a recent build, and is the highest spire in Colombia by virtue of the fact it's a Gothic structure made totally out of reinforced concrete. You only realise that when you're right up close, as you can see the rusted steel mesh sticking out of several of the saint's heads where the concrete has chipped away.

So due to the cursed nature of Manizales I decided to get into a series of minibuses and make my way to the much smaller Salento, which used to be a tiny little coffee growing hamlet but due to the actions of a single Pom, it's now firmly on the backpacker trail and it's hostel population is growing exponentially. I managed to arrive on a Sunday and that turns out to be a bit of a treat as it's the day when no-one does any work but rather hangs out about town in their best boots and cowboy hat. Not long after arriving in town I went into a small place where an older bloke in a serious moustache was pulling tintos (black coffees) from an ancient espresso machine while his daughter was waitressing. It had the kind of old school diner decor that every designer from Surry Hills to Newtown is trying their hardest to copy so it's crazy to see an authentic version made by simply not changing anything since the 50s. It was full of old men arguing about something my poor Spanish wouldn't let me understand, but one of the joys of people watching in foreign countries is you realise how universal people really are. I'm sure a large component of the conversation was about how young people are screwing up the world, and how it was different in their day.

As the afternoon bled into evening it became obvious that what you do in Salento on a Sunday is sit in a bar around Bolivar square and drink beer. So that's what I did. Again you can see human universals where extended families laugh and sing to the radio, kids run wild in the park and couple canoodle in the corner. I especially liked the old bloke with his face painted white who spent his time miming behind people walking around in order to entertain the patrons of each bar and get a bit of change out of each. Just like home some people have a sense of humour about it, and some people tried hard to punch him.

Besides the coffee Salento is right near the Cocora Valley, a highly green burst of farmland along the river north of town. You get up in the morning, haggle your way onto a jeep (quite often requiring some of you to hang off the back in a form of extreme car pooling) and start walking when you reach the top. It was a good 3 hour loop through a mixture of jungle and people's cow paddocks, with large sections of the hillsides cleared to make way for cows to graze and horses to run angrily at people who don't realise which side of the fence they are on. Like the Lost City I kind of just liked doing the exercise again, and being at a slightly higher 2,500m I feel like I'm getting a bit more used to thin air, which will be really important when I get to Peru.

The main drawcard of the valley, however is the fact Colombia's national tree grows there. It's a palm tree. I didn't think that would be cool either, except for the fact they grow something in the order of 30m high, and you can take very cool pictures of yourself as a dot at the base of one of them. You get a much better idea of just how tall they grow by the fact that so much of the ground around is cleared for cows to eat grass so they look taller than the very few of them that are still rising out of the smaller trees.

I ended up walking with a group of 8, who I met later on that night for dinner and after (rather surprisingly) smoking a Hookah pipe at one of the local cafes, and quite a few beers we decided to go looking for a tejo place. As I think I said earlier in one of these, tejo is a game that could only have come from Colombia. You throw 2kg lead weights across the room at little triangles of paper embedded in clay that contain small amounts of gunpowder. A direct hit by the weight results in an impressive explosion, and if you're really lucky a pile of burning paper landing somewhere in the middle of the people playing in the next lane. It's completely unsafe, and made more so by the fact you tend to be drinking heavily at the same time. We decided to play on the full lanes, where the target is about 20-odd metres away from you and predictably it took a full hour to actually get the weight to hit the clay, let alone make something explode. Even with a few direct hits only one of us managed it, but there is enough exploding going on around you to not matter so much.

So it was a hung over and early morning that had me on a minibus and the bus back to Bogota to make my flight for Lima on the Thursday before Easter. I was quite lucky that completely by accident there's some kind of cultural festival going on and Bolivar square was full to the gills with people waiting to see Manu Chau, who is apparently famous.

After a while you realise the main square & main street in every town in Colombia is named after Simon Bolivar, who was instrumental in getting the Spanish out of South America back in the 1800s. Despite dying on his way into exile he's had quite a resurgence as a historical hero of all the countries that he liberated to make a place called Gran Colombia (Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and parts of Northern Peru). He's a personal favourite of current Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has turned his country into a semi-communist kleptocracy under the flag of what he calls a Bolivarian Revolution, the idea being he's liberating Latin America from yanqui domination. No ego there.

Most of Latin America threw off the Spanish when they were a bit distracted in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars in Europe and really couldn't give too much of a crap what happened in their remote colonies. Bolivar was responsible for liberating pretty much everything down to Peru, but did so after Argentinian Jose de San Martin had already done the same in the south of the continent. They met in Peru during the liberation wars there and Bolivar basically told San Martin to bugger off home, he could handle things from here. Apparently San Martin did just that, quitting the military and politics altogether and living a content old retirement while Bolivar ended up a fairly hated military dictator who died trying to flee the continent (ironically) back to Europe.

So Manu Chao. I wandered into Plaza Bolivar and found half of Bogota waiting there for a free concert by said Mr Chao. Despite not really knowing his work I managed to follow along with the crowd, who seemed to know the words to every song and lose it and dance around like a fool in time with everyone else. There was something cool about seeing all the people filling the plaza and crashing like a wave up the steps of the cathedral (and quite often, climbing up on it) all singing and waving their arms together in time, even though I didn't know basically any of the songs. Well, it turns out, I did know one. When I was taking Spanish lessons the teacher used one of his songs Me gustas tu as a way of us getting to listen to spoken Spanish, and to drive into our heads by crazy repitition that me gusta something means I like whatever. It was kind of cool to be able to sing along to that one.

So tomorrow I leave Colombia behind to start a new life in Peru. The thing that has stuck me the most about this country is just how friendly and curious the people are. I guess we're in the early days of mass tourism here, and it makes me wish my terrible Spanish was a bit better so I could answer all their questions, a remarkable percentage of which seem to revolve around the death of Steve Irwin. You have to give the people what they want, so I learnt that "stingray" is la raya.