Adventures in South America

Sent: Friday, 19 Sep 1997 02:58:27 +0200 (GMT+0200)

If you know us well, you could have guessed the answer - go to sleep in the bus !!! This is what we did (was anything else possible ???) and around 4 O'clock in the morning discovered that we were on the move...The bus could continue its way during the freezing hours of the morning (freezing means really below zero - the windows were covered with thick layer of frost and we all in the bus (except the engine...) were freezing). Till today we don't know how they let the stuck man out of the baggage compartment...

In Puno, on the shores of lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world (more than 4,000 m above sea level) we had our last stop in Peru. We took an organised tour (for the first time in 3 weeks...) to some of the islands in the lake: Amantani, Tranquile and some floating islands.

The last was really interesting - The Islands are man-made and consist of imported weaven strew from the main land. The people actually live there with their domesticated animals 24 hours a day...

There are some problems in this way of life - First - the strew which makes the island float gets rotten quickly, so they have to put some new every week. Second - you cannot stand on one place for more than several seconds, otherwise you start (slowly but steadily) to sink...

We took the bus to another town on the shores of lake Titicaca - Copacabana. That time on the Bolivian side. The road till the border was good and paved, but immediately after crossing into Bolivia, the asphalt disappeared...

--- End of first part of our trip in Peru 15-7-97 until 7-8-97 ---

--- The Bolivian part of our trip 7-8-97 until 24-8-97 ---

We've just missed Bolivia's independence day in a day, but still saw the people in the tents/vans/caravans on the beach, empty bottles of beer and confetti's were everywhere. It all reminded to us the shores of the sea of Galilee (כינרת) on our independence day with one smelly difference - as there were no WC facilities on the beach, people did it wherever - and this is why we decided to call lake Titicaca from now on, lake Pipicaca...

We took a bus to the capital, La Paz. On the way we had to cross the lake with a ferry, and our bus crossed too with a special "bus ferry". The ferry was so small and our bus so big, so it looked like the ferry was going to sink every moment.... We were afraid that we were going to have another bus adventure...

La Paz is our favourite Latin American city till now, mostly because of its markets. More exactly La Paz is nothing but one big market. We enjoyed strolling around the streets for hours. We saw everything you can imagine and more - for instance, there was a street for selling animals - from chickens sorted by age (from one day chicks to grandmother (size 3) chickens) to angora rabbits (the sellers insisted on selling them to us, and somehow our explanations that we are tourists and thus cannot buy rabbits did not convince them). Like we have in Tel Aviv, specific markets in specific streets - Herzl St. for furnitures, BEZALEL market for FALAFEL etc., they have the same, but more developed - Potatoes street, Black magic street where you can buy a dried llama to bury under your house for good luck. etc. etc. etc.

La Paz is like Jerusalem - surrounded by mountains, but not of 1,000m but higher than 6,000m. This made us "Trek Sick". We wanted to step on some mountains again. We stopped a taxi driver on the street and asked him to come to fetch us from the hotel at 5 O'clock in the morning of the following day. As it was a long ride, the driver who didn't want to risk missing us in the morning, slept all night long in front of our hotel.

The starting point of our trek was refugio Huayna Potosi, a refuge where from groups of people go to climb the nearby 6,000m peak. We chatted with them, saw how they were organised, ate with them breakfast, but went to our own trek. We had a good topographic map (1:100,000) and were able to use the GPS. The first night we were sleeping at about 4,300m near a small lagoon. During the night it was snowing and we woke up into a white world. During that day the whether was deteriorating steadily and it was quite difficult to cross the high pass of the day (snow, mist and very limited visibility). That is why we were so glad to get down to 4,000m and to sleep there. "Tomorrow we will not need to walk in the snow and to wet our feet" I said happily. Of course that night it was snowing heavily even as low as 4,000m and in fact, in the middle of the night we needed to clear the roof of the tent from the heavy load of snow. It continued to snow all night long and we were wondering how deep the snow would be in the morning...