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Published: February 17th 2006
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It´s been a while. Geez, we don´t really talk any more (are we still cool?)
On Monday I left Macchu Picchu... I got into Cuzco in the evening, ate nachos (Jack´s Cafe in Cuzco is the best restaurant, straight up, don´t let the guys in Procudores convince you that 10 soles is a good meal.) and headed to the bus station.
I took an overnight bus to Puno, with a group of Chileans. They convinced me to continue on to Copacabana, Bolivia.
I am infatuated with being in two places at once, so I took all of these photos of me in Bolivia and Peru, it was AWESOME.
When we got to Copacabana, we figured we´d go directly to the Isla del Sol. It´s about an hour and a half from Copacabana.
We bought a case of 22´s for like 12 bucks, plus if you return the case they give you four bucks back.
Buying this case proved to be difficult, when we got to the island. It was very straining to carry the case up the mountain to where the hostals were at. It was the altitude, I´m sure.
We got a hostal for fifteen Bolivianos (I like to think of a Boliviano as half the value of a Sole, which is a third of the value of a Dollar, so it was like two bucks.)
Isla del Sol is a unique place. It is super inhabited, by farmers who grow beans, alpacas, burros, and pigs. I have no idea what kind of fertilizer you use to grow pigs. So there are lots of people, but there are no roads, or running water. It was quite beautiful.
We left the island on Wednesday afternoon. The Chileans headed to La Paz, I stayed over in Copacabana. When I got to the hostal I started talking in Spanish to this guy, after a couple of minutes I said ¨de donde eres¨. He said ¨de California.¨ Hahaha, another Califorinian. We decided we´d be friends except that we might be cramping each others style when we meet other travellers. Because when you have on Californian in your group that's novel, but two is too many. We decided to rep for our sides, I would be the southern californian movie star, and he would be the northern californian hippy.
Once these important dealings were settled, we headed to the top of a mountain overlooking Lake Titicaca. Me plus Stairs plus High Altitudes equals Stopping every three minutes. But we made it to the top by sunset.
So I saw this sunset in Jaco Beach, Costa Rica... which I said was probably the best sunset I´d ever seen... yeah the one over Lake Titicaca was actually the best. The sun was reflected in the water... real nice, real nice.
That night we met up with Katy and Nick, a Chilean and Alaskan, who I hung out with on multiple occasions. We got a pizza, cheese bread, and five liters, for under fifteen dollars.
Then we went to a bar that had live music. Everybody inside was from Argentina. Copacabana is a town that Argentinians move to sell necklaces on the streets... It seems like a good way to be.
On Thursday I got into La Paz around five o´clock. I found my way to a hostal that The Book describes as ¨like your college dorm, but with lots of signs in Hebrew.¨Neither was true. The Book is Lonely Planet´s South America on a Shoestring, it is commonly referred to as The Book, because every traveler from the Northern Hemisphere has it. It´s apparently two years old, but it´s been a relatively good reference. The hostel I´m staying at has changed it´s name, and taken away the televisions, though there still is cable.
I ran into an Italian that I met the day before in Copacabana, and stayed in a room with him and an Austrian. I walked around and was excited to find hundreds of street vendors hawking counterfeit goods.
I am really into the inauthentic clothing lines... Radbok, hike, Pomo. Later today I plan on purchasing a counterfeit Adidas jumpsuit for 12 bucks. I guess it´s pretty late in the day, but I´m gonna still try to buy hella fake shit.
Last night we ate pizza, and the restaurant actually had draft beer, the first time I´d ever seen it in this hemisphere. We talked to an annoying Belgian bank for a while, then around midnight we headed back to the hostal.
I was just getting ready to go to bed, when we realized ¨Hey, we should go out !¨and so we did. Downstairs as we came to this brilliant realization, was a group of Bolivians. They took us to a bar Folklorico.
There was a live band that played Bolivian Folk music. It was one of the wildest performances I´d ever seen. They had a violin, pan flute, guitar, electronic drum kit, charango, saxophone, and other strange bolivian instruments.
We were drinking pitchers of a drink that tasted like Tampico punch with a weird wine inside of it. I definitely wasn´t feeling it. Instead of peanuts as bar snacks, they offer coca leaves. Bolivians say Coca no Es un Droga, it´s been a part of their culture for thousands of years.
As the night progressed the Bolivian girls took us to dance with them. Bolivian folk dance is like Israeli dancing. It seems pretty lame, but it´s fun when you do it. Each dance has a specific meaning to a certain region. Theres a dance about the devil, where you get to put up devil ears, it´s the funnest dance.
The girls started asking me what I thought of socialism. They had started the Partido Obrero Revolucionario, a militant Socialist party in Bolivia. It was really cool to talk to actual socialists who are about to start a revolution. I was into one of them, and we got to talking, and it ended up being the most succesful endeavor of the past few weeks.
Although the US government might start tapping my phone lines because of my connections to South American revolutionaries.
So it´s like five O´clock (an hour later than New York, but I´m closer to the Pacific than I am to the Atlantic, WEIRD!) and I have to buy some counterfeit wares...
I´ll probably make my way down to the Salar de Uyunì, a surrealistic salt flat in southern Bolivia. PEACE.
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