Am I in the Dark Ages?

I am in a town with no wifi.  Like there actually isn´t wifi in this entire place.  It doesn´t exist.  And the hotel that we stayed at didn´t have a computer, so I feel like I´m living in the 90s.  I really hate Uyuni, it´s a wretched place, but we´re going on a tour of the salt flats for 3 days which will be awesome!
I´ll post pics and updates on Sucre and Potosí when I get to Chile (aka back to the present day).  It takes like 2 minutes to load a page here...it´s killing me!

Bolivia: Highs, lows, and nothing in between

I´ve been in Bolivia for a week, and it seems that there are just 2 extremes here: amazing and awful.  Nothing here ever goes according to plan, and you just have to roll with it.  Nothing really makes too much sense, and mine and Clare´s response to many things here is just "Oh, Bolivia."  Half the surprises thrown at you turn out to be wonderful, the other half end up being shit.  but at the end of the day, all the surprises--good and bad--make the journey so much more exciting.

 

Peru-Bolivia Border

Last Monday:

High:  I met up with Clare!  it was so surreal to see her in La Paz!  We´re traveling together now until new years!
Low: Creepy man grabbed my ass while I was in the market.  I then proceeded to flip out and scream at him in english down the street...all the locals thought I was a crazy person.

 

The Witch Market in La Paz

Tuesday:
Low: I went on the Bolivian weight loss plan.  Aka I spent all monday night and the better part of Tuesday puking my guts out.  Lesson learned--don´t trust fish in a landlocked country.
High: Met some really cool Argentinians who were sharing our room who were very concerned for me and kept checking up.  Also, if you´re going to be sick, having an awesome friend like Clare there to take of you is definitely a plus.

Wednesday Clare and I took the bus to some ruins just outside La Paz.  They were pretty small and dinky, and a lot of them are recreations.  There were a few cool artifacts though.  And there were some adorable little german kids on our trip.  And we met another really nice Argentinian on the tour, and he´s going to show me around BA when I get there!

Thursday Clare and I biked down Death Road from La Paz to La cumbre.  This road was the deadliest in the world, as it´s super windy and narrow with no safety rails on the cliff side, so it was shut down to cars 5 years ago.  You can now rent mountain bikes and go down and it was so much fun!  The views were spectacular, and we met 2 sisters from Alberta who were really chill.  Lunch was included in the tour which was hilarious--the guy pulled out a loaf of wonderbread, a package of baloney, some cream cheese and packets of mayonnaise and ketchup and said ¨lunch is served´ It was so ridiculous.

 Clare and I decided to spend the night in Coroico, which is close to La Cumbre, and our journey to get there was hilarious as well.  Also, the drivers here are mad.  Every time I get in a taxi or bus I´m terrified we´re giong to go off the side of the mountain as they try to pass other trucks on blind corners on the narrowest roads known to mankind.

 

Clare in the main Plaza of Coroico.

When we first got to coroico, we went to the tourist information centre on the main plaza and booked a hike for the following day to a couple different communities, including one called Tocaña which is an Afrobolivian community!  We hiked up to our hostel above the town with a gorgeous view of the city and the mountains.  We met a really nice German couple at dinner who told me great tips about Rio, and were pretty much just loving life.

 

The following day we set out on our hike with the tour guide, who was also the guy who booked it, and he was so funny.  At one point we were walking down this path on the side of the mountain and it suddenly just turned into this 30 cm not even path with mountain face on one side and a cliff on the other, that was littered with uneven rocks and I was sure that I was going to fall to my death in the remote mountains in Bolivia.  We made it to the bottom though, and then our guide said we were going to rest by the water for a but before starting the hike up the next mountain, but then we said he needed to buy water and just disappeared, and Clare and I were convinced he wasn´t coming back.  Again, we were wrong, and he finally returned, only to change into his bathing suit and jump into the river.  So random!

The afrobolivian community was really cool, but by the time we got to Polo Polo where there are coca plantations, it was pouring rain, and we were drenched, and we couldn´t take any photos for fear of ruining our cameras.  The hike back down from there was miserable, as the one little path down the mountain had literally turned into a stream from all the rain, so we were walking down through a stream on the side of a mountain in the pouring rain.  When we got back to the hostel, Clare discovered she had bed bugs!  We complained to the staff, but they refused to admit it was bed bugs.  Luckily we didn´t have our big packs with us--they were still in La Paz, so we didn´t have to worry to much about our clothes getting infested.

We went into town that night for some shitty mexican food (it had been highly reccommended by our guide books and locals, but they were all wrong), and then met this guy working at a pizza place/bar and hung out with him for awhile.  When we wanted to go home though, just after midnight, there were no cabs!  And all the locals told us that the cab companies were shut down this late.  I don´t understand this weird country.  We couldn´t walk back up to our hostel as it was at least half an hour with no lights, so we had to stay at another one in town that night!  We were so unimpressed.

I decided to stay yet another day and the next day we switched hostels and hung out in the town.  It was so cute, there was a wedding in the church on the plaza, and afterwards the couple came out into the street for their first dance and the whole town gathered to watch and there was a mariachi band singing to them and it was so adorable!

That night, we went to Tocaña as the afrobolivian community was having their annual cultural festival!  It was so much fun, but we had to leave quite early, as we didn´t want a repeat of the previous night gettin stranded.  Although the festival was supposed to start at 8, it was bolivian time, so that really meant 9, and then a bunch of speeches had to open the festival, and some people we were with had hired a cab to take them back at 10, so we sadly had to leave.

 Yes, their sign says 23 de septiembre...I´m not too sure why.

Clare and I went back to La Paz Sunday morning, and then went up to El Alto from which you can overlook the entire city.

 We then went to Cholitas wrestling, which is probably the most bizarre thing I have seen while travelling.  I don´t understand many things here.

We took an overnight bus to Sucre, but were woken up at 4:20 in the morning because the bus had broken down.  I was half asleep and not down to deal with this shit in spanish, and we ended up having to wait for another bus to come and get us and take us the remaining few hours.  WTF BOLIVIA.

We´re in Sucre now though, and it seems like a cute place.  It´s super busy I think because everyone is doing their last minute christmas shopping, but all the whitewashed buildings look cool.

We´re going to go out for christmas dinner tonight, and might check out a midnight mass in the cemetary!

The Sacred Valley, the Inca Trail, Machu Picchu!

The view of Cuzco from the top of the city.

Before starting the Inca Trail, we did a tour of the Sacred Valley Ollataytambo.  We went to a women´s collective where they make artisan goods from Alpaca wool.  They used to have looms, but because of a flood about 4 years ago, all their equipment was destroyed so they make the garments in the way shown above.  It can take them upto a month to make each item, as they can only weave in their free time--outside of maintaining the house, cooking, and caring for their children.  They also turn the alpaca wool in yarn by hand with no machine, and dye all the yarns with natural dyes.

My roommate Becca and I at one of the ruins in the Sacred Valley.  The farmers made terraces for their crops so that the stones would heat up from the sun and cast the warmth back down, allowing them to grow crops at high altitudes.  The difference between each terrace can be as much as 5 degrees.  They also used sand as a layer underneath the soil to prevent flooding, as they were aware of the natural disasters common to the area.

Our group at the start of the Inca Trail!

Day one was an easy climb, relatively flat.  The mountains looked amazing as the clouds descended down upon them--it looked like a cloud waterfall in slow motion.

The first night Becca woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me that all my shit was in a puddle.  Leaky tents are the worst, and none of my clothes nor my sleeping bag ever dried after that until the end of the trip.

At the top of Dead Woman´s Pass (4200 m) on day 2.

Dead Women´s Pass with the valey behind me.  It was freezing up there, and it started to pour about 5 minutes after we got up--good thing we were the quick ones in the group, as the people behind us were miserable by the time they got to the top, and it wasn´t clear enough to take any shots.

Day 3 the backdrop shifted amazingly quickly.  We went from being just mountainside to being in a cloud forest.  We were literally walkeding through the clouds, and it was so lush.  I also found out on Day 3 that my raincoat isn´t actually waterproof (thanks a lot Columbia).  I hurt my knee after lunch and then had to go down hundreds on slippery wet uneven stone steps in pain and drenched.  Not so much fun.

Day 4 we wokr up at 3:40 am to hike to Sun Gate.  I was still in pain and going pretty slowly, and it wasn´t clear enough to see Machu Picchu from the Sun Gate, but it started to clear up on the trek down, and there was actually a bit of sun (for the first time ever) by the time we got to the Inca city.

Machu Picchu was amazing, and it totally made it worth all the wetness and coldness that preceeded it for 3 days.  I´m in Cuzco now for a few more nights, and then I head to La Paz to meet up with Clare!

Lago Titicaca

I started the group trip in Lima, from which we flew to Puno and visited Lake Titicaca--the world´s largest high altitude lake.  First we visited the floating islands which is where the Aymari people live--not wanting to be conquered by the Incas, they fled to the lake and created islands out of reeds.  Every 3 months the entire island is replaced by new reedws (gradually over 3 months), with up to 3 families living on each island.

We then visited Taquile Island, and went to a peninsula to do a homestay.  We got to dress up in the Aymari traditional costumes and learn their dances.

In the morning we had to help our host families with their chores--first we shepparded sheep in the field to graze, and then we spent a few hours hoeing potatoes.

Me and my host family.

I jumped into Lake Titicaca.  It was FREEZING!

Peru! (Lima, Ica, Huacachina)

mmmm ceviche.  I could just eat it and eat it forever.  Lima has amazing food.

The view of the coast of Lima from Miraflores.  Quite a pretty place, but not much to do.  I went to a couple museums, but they were all quite small, and wandered around the downtown a bit as well.  I was just in the biggest city in the americas though, so maybe the comparison is a bit harsh.

So the state of the homes in these suburbs up the mountain are awful, many don´t even have running water.  But it looks really cool to see all the colourful huts going up the mountain.

I left Lima to go to Huacachina for a couple days--it´s a tiny oasis in the middle of the desert just next to the town of Ica.

We went sandboarding down the dunes after being driven around the desert in a dunebuggy by a crazy person.  It was really fun/slightly terrifying, but I emerged with only a few bruises.

I´m leaving for Cusco and Puno tomorrow where I´m going to do a homestay on Lake Titicaca, and then hike the Inca Trail up Machu Picchu!

Check out an automatically updated map of where I am-- http://www.hi-comm.ekit.com/ekit/tj/TJM/maya_gunnarsson/journal_map

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