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Published: April 29th 2006
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Hello to all. The last few weeks have been absolutely incredible! After the Inca Trail we moved down to Puno in Peru and have since been to La Paz in Bolivia, flown to the jungle and back, and then flown to Buenos Aires!
Lake Titicaca is a HUGE lake at 3800m abs which sits between Peru and Bolivia and is home to the famous floating islands. Tribes back in the day were scared of rival tribes so just made themselves some islands out of reeds and still now just float on the lake! It´s really funny, they make EVERYTHING from reeds, they even just walk by, grab a reed and get a munch on! A few months before we got there, on one of the islands they´d had a little tiff so one day they just separated themselves and floated off! We visited their floating school and all the children sang for us which was pretty funny, they were all pretty mental! After seeing these islands we went a further 3 hours across the lake to a ´non-reed´ island and were hosted by local families. This was quite fun, played a football match against the locals in their funky little
stadium, went for a trek to the top of the island for the sunset and then dressed up in local attire and got involved in a bit of local dancing! There was no electricity in these guys´ places so it was all candlelight, our ´Mum & Dad´for the night were pretty cool although we couldn´t communicate with them much.
After Puno, next stop Bolivia. Getting to La Paz was fairly amusing, we were on the bus and all of a sudden we were asked to get off, we assumed to change buses. All of a sudden we then see our bus floating off across a lake with all of our bags on! We worked out where to get a boat from eventually to follow the bags but as we had just crossed the border we had no local currency on us, luckily I had some US$ so that was a relief!
La Paz is the highest capital city in the world and it´s in a big basin and the air isn´t the best, we all had a sore throat for pretty much the whole time we spent there. We arrived on Easter weekend so there were lots of
parades on, we stayed there for about 5 days just getting our drink on pretty much!
THE WORLD´S MOST DANGEROUS ROAD!
The road from La Paz To Coroico is La Paz´s biggest tourist attraction. Statistics for number of deaths on this road show this to be by far the most dangerous road in the world! There are at points 1200ft drops straight down right at the side of the road and also the drop keeps switching sides so you never know where you´re safe! We decided to go mountain biking down this road and we are all agreed that this is the most fun we´d had since being in SA. The ride starts at 4800m and then finishes at near to sea level! We were hitting speeds of 40mph+, after having a few near death experiences you tell yourself that you will slow down and keep it cool for a bit but once that adrenalin starts going again you can´t help but hammer it down! At one point we flew by some huge eagles only a few metres from us which was amazing. We ended up at a beautiful hotel and all had a dip in the pool,
buffet lunch and watched Barca beat AC. To summarise it was just amazing! We had a two hour wait on the way back as a lorry had gotten stuck on the damn road!
THE JUNGLE
We decided to do a jungle trek in Rurrenabaque after the mountain biking. We could have done a 20hr bus journey (using that road we cycled down!) but after going down the road and hearing a few stories about Bolivian buses we decided the 1hr flight might be a better option! The plane we flew out on was an 18 seater job which was pretty cool, was really funny landing, we were waiting to see the runway and then it was a case of ´Oh, Ok we´re just gonna land on the grass then!´. Our hostal was really cool, hammocks everywhere and a resident parrot and a resident kitten which were really funny. You should have seen Joe´s face when he awoke in his hammock with a massive parrot on his chest flapping and squawking! Our tour was for 3 days, we went 3 hrs by jeep and then 3hrs by boat to get to our little riverside pad with more hammocks -
LOVE the hammocks! Along the way we saw soooo much wildlife, turtles, amazonian pink dolphins, loads of different types of monkeys, alligators, crocs and loads of massive birds. We pulled up next to some yellow monkeys at the side of the river and they came and jumped on us, really friendly little mites! After watching the sun set over a beer we went out on croc hunt with our torches in the dark which was pretty cool. If there´s a cayman crocodile his eyes glow bright yellow and if there´s an alligator his eyes glow up bright red, the trip was quality, I have never seen so many stars in the sky. Our resident alligator Frederico was really friendly, you could stroke him on the head and he really liked it! He didn´t like Lanni though! The boys fed Lanni to him so we thought that was the end of her but once Fred realised that Lanni wasn´t that tasty he soon gave her back! The daughter of the family that ran our little pad adored Lanni and it would have been much more difficult to recover Lanni from her than the alligator so Lanni now has a new home.
In the morning we walked throught the pampas for three hours in thigh-deep water grasslands looking for anacondas, you kinda don´t really want to find one! We never found one. Activity for the afternoon was swimming with the pink dolphins which was pretty cool, they didn´t come that close, about 7-8m at closest but was just nice to be in the water. After being bitten about 8 million times and probably getting malaria we just had a bit of pirañha fishing the next day. Bean was the only one of us who caught anything, he caught three but they were tincy so don´t let him tell you otherwise! - Jealousy!
Our journey back on the plane was more than a little worrying, the plane was being blown about everywhere, we were in hysterics (nervous laughter), some people were crying though! It was a real relief to get back on the ground!!!
The next day we got a couple of planes over to Buenos Aires to buy some time. Been here a couple of days now, we landed on our feet with the football though. Went to watch River Plate Vs Corinthians in the quarter final of the South
American Cup. River are the biggest team along with Boca in Argentina and Corinthians are the biggest team in Brazil and the Cup is like our Champions League. The stadium was near to full capacity which is 76,500 and there were flares galore. We stood in with the locals and you couldn´t help but jump about and mumble along to the songs, it was truly amazing!
Well... off to Uraguay for a few days and then off to Iguazu to see the falls and maybe some big cats before hitting the Brazilian beaches!
Oh and...... Bean and I are going skydiving on Saturday!
Take it easy chicos y chicas!
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