From the Arsehole of the Andes to the Birthplace of the Sun

Our two day journey from Cochabamba to La Paz took us initially up through the mountains to 4,500 metres, so not much oxygen there, and then gently down onto the Altiplano with the grazing herds of llama and sheep and occasionally cattle and the odd pig.  Then we dropped down into La Paz.

La Paz is in the bowl of a mountain range and the original city is down in the bottom but around the top of the bowl, rather like an unpleasant doughnut, is the sprawling area known as El Alto.  El Alto is the home of thieves, brigands and ne’er do wells, also second hand tyre salesmen, and dusty stalls selling everything you can imagine.

The city itself, La Paz proper, has narrow streets with high buildings on either side and very narrow pavements.  The pavements were choked with children and adults and street vendors and the roads were choked with big heavy diesels all kicking out thick acrid pollutants which hung in the air.  Coupled with this the city was dirty, many of the buildings ill maintained and when we walked uphill which we couldn’t really avoid, at an altitude of nearly 4,000 metres, it was exceedingly hard work.

Extremely neat power cabling, La Paz

La Paz Central

Typical La Paz street congestion

We did our best to view the sights.  We sat in the central plaza, we visited cathedrals and we fought our way along body choked alleyways to the witches’ market which has been billed as a venue for herbal remedies and other forms of mystical and magical potions.  One of the things that they were selling were what appeared to be mummified llama foetuses which, as everyone knows, are the perfect cure for arthritis, or is it dropsy? 

Cathedral de San Francisco, La Paz

Campesina women outside the Cathedral

Campesina women in conversation

Campesina woman, Witches Market

One of the Witches

At the Witches Market

Open for business

Then we went on the cable car.  La Paz from the air is more acceptable than La Paz from the ground, if only because you are up in the air and therefore away from some of the congestion and fug that is the characteristic of ground level.

The cable cars are very un-Bolivian.  For one thing they are immaculate, they are perfectly presented, and they are colour coded  so that if you want to get to place A you go on the purple one, to place B you go on the blue one, to place C you go on the yellow one, and so on.  We happily did the entire circuit of the city for the grand sum of 22 Bolivianos, or £2.50 for both of us and that involved five different cable cars.

View from the cable car

Cable car, La Paz

View from the cable car

We could see just how tightly packed the houses are and when we went up to El Alto, we could see buildings which were literally clinging to the edge of vertical drops, and in some cases with concrete floors that overhung the vertical drops by a foot or so.  We looked down on people’s washing, on the huge cemetery, on school playgrounds and dogs fighting and on the strange areas where the hillside has not yet been tamed.

Bird's eye view of the washing

La Paz cemetery (full!)

La Paz city from the cable car

Alan rather ungraciously nicknamed La Paz ‘The Arsehole of the Andes’ and after two days we very gladly bid it good riddance.

After La Paz we stopped off for a day at a place called Tiwanaku which is the foremost pre-Columbian site, apparently, in South America.  It was a civilisation that lasted for 3,000 years and at its peak its influence spread through much of northern Argentina and as far as the Peruvian coast.

There’s not much left of it.  It got comprehensively knocked about by the Spanish who of course, scenting gold, ripped everything to bits.  The sites themselves take quite a lot of imagination to bring them alive.  There are a series of half built walls, some rocky terraces, some sunken areas with carved heads, mostly eroded away, which apparently represent the deities of local tribal groups that were subsumed into the civilisation.  

The Gate of the Moon, Tiwanaku

Heads of subjugated minor deities, Tiwanaku

'I wonder when the next train will be?'

We sat still and tried to imagine what the places would have been like at the height of their power, but it is very difficult to translate a jumble of rocks into a living entity and we largely failed.

Our next destination after Tiwanaku was the small town of Copacabana which overlooks Lake Titicaca, just a few kilometres from the Peruvian border.  Copacabana beach in Brazil was apparently named after the Virgen de Copacabana shrine which is in this town (although neither of us understands the connection).

There are two ways to get to Copacabana from Tiwanaku.  The nice lady at our hotel told us that it was very easy to get through the border into Peru and then back through the border into Bolivia which is the way that you get to Copacabana if you’re going clockwise.  If you go anti-clockwise you don’t go through any borders but it’s a much longer way round.  We chose the former.  Bad choice!

Stooks of oats, on the road from Tiwanaku to Copacabana 

Stooks of oats drying in the sun

We managed to completely miss the Bolivia/Peru border, having been misdirected by a little man who sent us along a right fork in the road instead of the left fork which would have taken us to Customs and Immigration.  We continued merrily along the road for some way until we reached the Peru/Bolivia border.  This is when we got into trouble.

Having arrived without an exit stamp from Bolivia or an entry stamp into Peru, there followed a two hour discussion with the Peruvian Customs authorities. They could not quite work out what to do with us.  At one stage there was a suggestion that they might like to put some handcuffs on us, but we think that was meant more as a warning than actual statement of intent.

The options that were ultimately discussed were as follows:

1. That we should go back 44 kilometres to the Bolivia/Peru border where we should have got the entry stamp into Peru and then come back.

2. That they might be able to sort it all out at this border and there were some murmured suggestions of a fine, in other words a bribe.

3. That one of the Customs Officials would go with Alan to Puno, a mere 144 km, to get the matter sorted out and then drive back.

After a certain amount of deliberation and intervention from a variety of well meaning people who spoke English, it was decided that we should go all the way back to the previous Customs post where we should have got our documents stamped in the first place and this we did.  This only wasted a few more hours, but it was a relief to feel ‘legal’ again.

Apart from being home to Bolivia’s most revered shrine (which we were prohibited to photograph), Copacabana is the place from where you can visit Lake Titicaca’s two most sacred islands, the Isla del Sol and the Isla de la Luna.  The Incas believed that the Isla del Sol was the birthplace of their nation and the place where the great Inca God drew forth the sun from a hole in a sacred rock, although quite how they got on before that we don’t know, what with it being dark and cold.

View of Copacabana from lakeside

Door carving, Copacabana Cathedral

At the waterside we organised a boat and a boatman and then had six hours of the most wonderful trip across Lake Titicaca.  The sun was warm on our backs, there were gulls and ducks and American coots around the place, the water was clear as gin and the boat moved at a sedate pace across the ripples.

Isla de la Luna, Lake Titicaca

Seagulls taking flight, Lake Titicaca

Our first stop was the Isla de la Luna, a very small island which has upon it some Inca remains known as the House of the Virgins.  Apparently, a bunch of virgins were brought to the island by an old woman who instructed them in the art of weaving the sacred cloth and also presumably the art of remaining a virgin.  Mind you, given that there weren’t any men on the island this matter might not have been as difficult as would first appear.

House of Virgins, Isla de la Luna

The ruins were quite atmospheric with incised double cross shaped entrances and in one place there were a series of niches where people to this day are putting offerings of money, flowers, fruit, cigarettes and coca leaves.

Offerings in the Shrine to Virgins

The next stop was the Isla del Sol which was a different matter.  It was pretty well rammed with people, locals and foreign tourists, but there were a number of nice hotels and restaurants and we sat on the terrace of one restaurant and had a sandwich and a beer.

The only means of transport on the island is donkeys and we watched them being led down the steep stony track to the beach, then loaded up and driven back up the track to wherever they were delivering. They’re long suffering little beasts, very shaggy but apparently uncomplaining and Alan spent a lot of time annoying the locals by taking photographs of them.

Sole means of transport, Isla del Sol

Pack animals, Isla del Sol

Campesina woman multi-tasking

Loading up the donkey

Campesina, Isla del Sol

Snacking on lake weed

After a pleasant couple of days, we left Copacabana and came back across the border into Peru, this time without any difficulty.  It was then a relatively short drive to the town of Puno where we spent our last night next to Lake Titicaca.  Alan also spent a happy couple of hours with his camera exploring the wetland next to our hotel.

Speckled Teal, Wetland at Puno

Large black pig, not impressed

Andean fox, Puno wetlands

Yesterday, Tuesday 15^th April, we drove 300 kilometres back across the Altiplano and the Andes to Arequipa, Peru’s second largest city, and so our adventure continues.

'Shaun' the Alpaca and friends, Altiplano