Isla del sol, to never seeing the sol !

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We arrived in Copacabana around 2pmafter the nutcase driver nearly killed us on every corner. Overtaking on blind bends and absolutely bombing it with massive drops at the side did not make for good travelling. We took this bus as it was the locals bus and cheaper than the big tourist buses but we started to think about where your money goes after flying round the first couple of bends and with me still having 'Bolivia Belly' how either of us managed not to fill our pants is beyond me. I couldn't tell whether he was the best driver the worlds ever seen or the worst, but I did tell him when we got off that it was 'mas rapido' and 'no muy buen' (too fast and not good). After that we had to get on another bus that boarded what looked like a massive plank of wood and crossed the huge lake. It was a funny site seeing a bus crossing a river on a boat.

Laura had read that most of the hostals in Copacabana were dumps and with me being ill we checked into a hotel that night that cost £20 for the night for both of us and went to walk round the town and get our tickets for the Isle del Sol which cost us £3.50 for us both for the hour and half boat ride.

We then went for some tea and got a nice 3 course meal for £2.50 that was vegetable soup, fresh trout with rice and chips and a dessert, although there wasn't any desserts left so the bloke gave us a coffee. That night we walked to the top of the hill overlooking Copacabana to watch the sunset over the lake with a bottle of wine and very nearly didn't make it to the top with the realisation of the altitude hitting home, at nearly 5,000mts above sea level it's nearly half way up from where we did our sky dive!

I thought I was over the 'Bolivia Belly' as I went to bed that night as I'd felt sound that day but again woke up not long after going to bed feeling like death and spending most of the night on the toilet. I was definitely going to the doctors in the morning.

After breakfast we had a couple of hours to kill before our boat left at 1.30pm so I went to find a doctor. After walking round the main square we saw a sign for a 'Farmacia' pointing towards an internet shop so we walked in and asked where the pharmacy was and the bloke turned round and opened a glass cabinet behind his computer and said 'Farmacia, que problem?' I tried explaining I'd been having belly ache and diarrhoea for nearly a week but he didn't understand a word I was saying, even though I was doing pretty good hand actions too. In the end I said 'Doctor?' And he proceeded to point me in the direction of the local doctor. After trying to find it for an hour we sacked it off and headed to another chemist we walked past earlier that understood my hand movements and sorted me out some tablets and I took one straight away.

We then got on our boat to the island that we were to spend a night on and we both fell asleep on it and woke up to a woman asking for $5 bolivianos for 'island tax'. We paid it and started to walk round where the whole Inca civilisation began, I then got a rumble in my stomach and had to find a toilet sharpish. We had past a decent looking place to stay as we were walking earlier so I ran back there and shouted to Loz to check us in for a room. The tablet I took didn't seem to do a thing and seemed to make my diarrhoea even worse and it was a good job when I'd finished that Loz had managed to sort us a room as when I had finished there wasn't a flush! I lifted up the back to see if I could get the mess to shift but there was nothing there, I then saw a bucket of water in the corner of the room so I poured it down and eventually got the foulest smelling mess ever to shift. I went back to find Loz who was sat in our newly found room admiring the view out of the window when the lady who Laura sorted the room off ran past gipping her head off and spewed over the wall! I don't know where my mess had gone to but we quickly got out of the room for a walk and passed the old lady sat with her head inbetween her knees trying to get her breath, said a quick 'gracias' and did one.

Walking round we saw men getting off boats with donkeys and llamas with piles of sacks full of things tied to their backs starting to climb up the steep steps to the waiting shops that had run out of supplies. We got sat down on some rocks to take it all in and got ambushed by 3 kids wanting to know if we had any water or pop. They kept clenching their throats saying 'aqua' 'cola' which we didn't have so gave them some change that they snatched and added it to the jingling pile in their pockets. Nice trick.

We walked round the island a bit more and found one of a hundred pizza places on the island that we went to. Apparently Isle del Sol rivals Rome for pizza places per square miles which is not bad for an island with only two and a half thousand people on it!

We went back to our room and avoided the old gipping lady and went to bed ready to explore the island some more in the morning. It was the first night in a while I'd not been up at the toilet so hopefully the tablets are doing something right. We woke up and found a place doing fried egg sandwiches for breakfast so got in there with every intention of walking round the whole island after. After walking round for about 20mins though and getting absolutely knackered by the altitude we bumped into a burly bloke from Manchester, also called Michael, that told us not to bother walking round the whole thing as he said that if you'd walked round the south side (which we did yesterday) you'd seen the lot. He also told us that there were more 'path taxes' to pay so instead we jumped on the next boat, that was just docking, heading back to Copacabana.

We got back to Copacabana and collected our washing and got some grub and hit the sack ready for our 10hour bus ride to Arequipa.The second most populous city in Peru behind the capital, Arequipa is flanked by mountains and has nearly yearly-round sunshine and even has a volcano called Misti that looks down on the city that some ancient mummies were recently found on that we wanted to have a look at and that same volcano actually erupted in 1985 covering the whole city, fingers crossed it wasn't going to go off while we were there!

The bus over to Arequipa, we were told, was a direct bus that stopped at the borders of Bolivia and Peru and we were to get our exit and entrance stamps and carry on our way on the same bus. We were also told that we would get food and drink and that the bus had wi-fi on board and that our seats would go all the way back so we could sleep. It was when we got on the bus that we realised that the woman would have probably told us that Elvis was driving us to Arequipa aswell as what she said was a load of shit. No food, no drink, broken chairs and it stunk to high heaven not helped by the fact that the old woman sat behind Laura had her manky foot out of her flip flop and up on Loz's arm rest! We wouldn't have minded the bus at all if it was what we were expecting but being lied to in a swanky office by some old fat bird had us thinking that we were maybe on a decent bus this time after our wacky races bus into Copacabana.

We eventually got to Arequipa around 8pm and got to the massive main square where we past a KFC, a Burger King and a Pizza Hut all under one roof. We got to our hostal that seemed really nice we were in a room of three beds with no one in the spare one so we dumped our stuff and went for a walk round the town. As we got back to the main square there was thousands of people gathered outside the huge church with what looked like the Pope addressing the crowd. We watched for a bit convinced it was him but found out it was the Archbishop of Arequipa so went off in search of the Mecca we saw earlier of the KFC, Burger King and Pizza Hut in one. As our minds were still set in Bolivia money the KFC looked far too expensive so we went across the road to a cafe that Loz liked the look of. I ordered a soup and Loz got some cake and they both came and both said that it was the best soup I'd ever had, and the best cake that Laura had ever had. Laura's mam makes cakes for a living so Loz reckons she knows a thing or two about cakes (which could explain why she buys at least one piece of cake a day) and swore blind that the carrot cake she ordered was the nicest cake she had ever put in her mouth. My soup was also gorgeous and had peppers, chillis, noodles and a poached egg all bobbing up and down in a spicy tomato soup. The waiter even came and plonked down what we thought was a shot of something and after plucking up courage to neck it found out it was just apple tea! After eating we worked out the exchange rate was to half the cost, and half it again and it was pretty much what it would cost in pounds, which made my KFC quite reasonable but rather than run across the road to get one I agreed to leave it for another day.

We got up the next day and someone was in the spare bed, an Israeli guy called Yuval had checked in and as we got talking that morning we all agreed we fancied going out round Arequipa that night and getting blind drunk. We went to get a bottle of rum and chilled round our hostal in the day and started drinking around 2.30pm when we skyped our mate Lewis back home and after a good catch up we hit the town with Yuval already blurry eyed from the rum we'd been drinking most of the day.

From what I remember Arequipa's nightlife was brilliant. It has a couple of university's in the city so there was plenty of people out and from what we could gather it must have been a prom at a local school as there was loads of young kids dressed up really smart trying to get in all the bars and clubs, a lot like back home! Yuval was sound too, answering all sorts of questions we had about Israel, although the answers to our questions we had I can't remember and still know precisely nothing about Israel, we returned the favour though telling him London isn't all that and the better people are from the north. We ended up in what I thought was a karaoke bar but after being refused to get up and sing I realised it was actually a live band that was on, I was bang up for knocking out a bit of Stand By Me aswell. After falling short on knocking the Peruvian people dead on the mic it was time to go back to our hostal and its been quite a while since I've had to leave one leg hanging out of the bed, foot to the floor, to stop the room from violently spinning.

We woke up feeling like death with a hangover that only a KFC breakfast could cure and then we went to find the museum with the mummies in that we had heard about.

The mummies in the museum weren't actually mummies, and there was only one, a preserved 11 year old girl known as Juanita who was found in 1995 by an expedition team that was climbing the Misti volcano and she has been awarded as one of the earths top ten ever discoveries. Juanita, an Inca princess had been an offering to the gods in the 1400's after a lot of bad weather, the belief being that if they offered something as beautiful and pure as an inca princess the bad weather would cease and nice sunny weather would follow. Whether or not the weather changed after they brutally smashed an 11 year old girl over the head with an axe is still a mystery. They do know though that Juanita wasn't mummified, she had not been preserved by the people of her generation but her body had actually frozen solid on top on Misti after her ceremonial 'offering' and it was the massive eruption in 1985 that they think melted the huge ice caps which contained her. We watched a video in the museum that explained that after a spell of bad incidents like weather or ill health the incas would make offerings to the gods, sometimes of beautiful textiles, statues, plates and cups and in some seriously bad times they would offer young children. The children and the child's families would have known from birth that if things were to get bad that they would be 'offered' to the gods and it was considered a huge privilege that only the most beautiful looking could be offered. Sacred sites were nearly always at the top of mountains which the children would have to walk to the top of, a kind of pilgrimage, sometimes having to walk from one side of the inca populated South America to the other, often taking weeks, months or years to complete. I don't know about you but at 11 years old I wasn't that bothered on walking anywhere, let alone for 9 months solid, then having to hike up a frozen mountain in flip flops only to be smashed over the head and left to freeze. But time does change things and apparently back then it was one of the best things you could aspire to. The children and the families believed that after being sacrificed the children themselves in the afterlife would turn into gods. Scientists have discovered that 6-8 hours before her fatal blow Juanita eat vegetables, she had a mild chest infection and when she got at the top of the mountain she was drugged! I asked how on earth scientists knew these facts and apparently it's because Juanita was preserved in ice her entire body was frozen, her blood, organs, skin, hair, stomach contents and her clothes are exactly how they were when she was frozen over 613 years ago. This is how they know that she must have been an inca princess as her clothes were so well made and brightly coloured and are apparently far superior to that of other sacrificed children that have been found, meaning that whatever bad times caused her to be bludgeoned to death must have been very, very bad times to sacrifice a princess.

The next day we walked round the town and headed for an outdoor market that Laura had read about and got a little bit nostalgic as we got there as it was pretty much exactly the same as Barnsley market. Fruit, veg, meat, chicken, fish, cheese and bits and bats of shit filled the stalls, they even had a pet corner with boxes and boxes full of puppies. I did have to explain to Loz that buying one couldn't have been an option but it was hard walking past them all wondering what would happen to them if they didn't get sold, what with us seeing stray dogs all over South America so far.

That night we made a pasta bake with the stuff we got from the market and booked ourselves, and our new mate Yuval, onto a 10 hour bus to Huacachina for the day after. Huacachina is a village that was built in the 1920's for the Peruvian elite, surrounded by desert and sand dunes they built a lagoon in the middle of the desert and built an amazing looking town around the lagoon for all the well-off to swan around these days though 2 tired looking Yorkshire-arians and a sweaty Israeli is about as elite as it gets. The place does offer hot weather and the chance to sand board down the massive sand dunes though so as we arrived at 7am, we found a hostal that gave us a room and a sand board 'lesson' for a good price and went to sleep on the sun bed round the pool that the hostal had, I was going to like this place.

That afternoon Laura, Yuval and me found out the our sand boarding included a dune buggy rally and roaring round the desert jumping up and over sand dunes in basically a massive go-cart was class. I'm sure the driver had had an argument with his missus and was deliberately trying to roll the buggy over! He was a mentalist but luckily we didn't roll and break our necks and had a good scream as we teared up and down vertical drops on the way to the top of the dune for our sand boarding. Our sand board was a 5ft long piece of chipboard with Velcro nailed to it to strap your shoes in and our lesson was 'put your feet in the straps.....like that.......now go'. Haha, nobody could stand up so instead we ended up flying down the massive dunes laid on our bellys. It was class and we stayed up there until the sun set and then rode in the death buggy back down to Huacachina again screaming like girls. The rest of our time we spent in Huchacina just chilling and sunbathing by the pool reading the best book I've ever read - Glue by Irvine Welsh, bought for me by my good mate Ben as a leaving present, if you ever get chance, read it. I also made it my mission every morning to get to the bar lady round the pool first with my iPod before the Israelis did. Their music was seriously crap.

We went to a BBQ on Friday night at a place called 'The Pub' next door to our hostal. The BBQ was out on the street and the woman was cooking up a right storm £3.75 each for corazon de toro (bulls heart) kebabs with sweet potato chips, salad and the most unbelievable salsa you've ever tasted. For those of you who haven't tried bulls heart it doesn't taste like chicken or like liver (which is what I was expecting) it tastes like steak, tender and juicy so if you see it in the Asda late on a Sunday with a whoops sticker on get some and bang it in freezer! It's gorgeous!

As Huacachina is so small, only 115 people live here, they only have a couple of small shops that don't sell much and are expensive so one day we decided to walk into Ica which is about a 20min walk which wasn't that interesting apart from seeing one of the strangest things we've seen so far. Walking along in the baking heat Laura could see something at the side of the road 'Mike is that a person?' We got a little closer and just sat in the gravel at the side of the dirt track road was a large lady completely naked with a plastic sheet wrapped round her just covering her dignity. It was so weird we had no idea what to do she was just staring across the other side of the road ? Had she been on a massive bender? There was just no explanation for this woman being there? Basically in the middle of the desert! She definitely didn't look like she could speak English and to be honest we were a little scared so we walked past trying not to stare rather than help her in broken English. We kept looking back in amazement but the woman didn't move, she just kept staring into space, very strange. In the supermarket we saw some vinegar made by a company called 'Fanny' that we thought was quite funny and by the time we'd done the big shop and headed back the naked woman had gone. I'd have loved to see her trying to flag a taxi down!

It was when we got back to our hostal I got a message from one of our mates called Johnny that had got a job in Ecuador and wanted to come and have a little holiday with us in Peru. As we were only 4 hours away from Lima, the capital of Peru, which had an international airport we decided to meet up there that coming weekend. Small world and all that!!

We arrived in Lima on the Saturday and arranged to meet Johnny in a hostal in an area of the capital called Barranco, a really really cool place with some cool looking bars. We arrived and jumped in the shower and Johnny turned up and we had a little rendezvous in the kitchen with some beers and decided to hit the town. As we were wondering round doing that thing you do walking past places going 'that place looks sound...lets walk on a bit see if there's anywhere else...that looks nice...not as nice as that other one...lets walk on...god no not in there...oh that looks class, bit expensive though...no don't like that place....' I asked a group of people that looked like they knew where they were going where they were headed. They said that they were going to a decent bar down the road and it'd be cool for us to join them. We got in the bar and it was decent and got chatting to one of the guys behind the bar called Alonso after he asked where we were from and told him England and he said he liked the artist from England called Banksy. That was it, I was chatting to him all night. For those that don't know Banksy he's a bit of a political activist and does really cool art, usually graffiti'd on walls of buildings that usually make the price of the building it's painted on sky rocket. I've been to glastonbury once and he nicked a load of portaloo's and made a life sized stone henge out of them. The thing is that nobody knows who Banksy is, he has books and films out but he is not publicly known at all, proper cool. Anyways I was chatting away with this barman and his two mates that also worked behind the bar, Gabriel and Ceaser when the owner had to ask us to leave. I looked round and there was only us in and it was nearly 4am! I told them that we were thinking of going to a nightclub as we were with a friend of ours who was on his holidays so to speak and the 3 lads said they had planned to just go home after they had finished work but now wanted to show us the best of what Lima nightlife had to offer. We ended up in a massive nightclub, like something out of Ibiza that was playing some right tunes. It was packed and there was a huge queue outside but they got us straight to the front and got us in for nowt! We were the only English people in the whole place and drank like fish til god knows when and got a taxi back to our hostal navigated by our new best mates.

The day after was spent wondering round our hostal trying to remember what it was like not to have a massive headache but we did manage to walk into the centre and get a massive greasy burger before walking back and getting straight back into bed!

The day after that we headed for a district of Lima called Miraflores and checked into a hostal we found just up the road from a coffee shop we stopped in after heading for one that the lonely planet recommended but it was now a building site. As we were walking round looking lost we were stopped by a bloke with a bit of a swagger 'Eeer, a yous from England?' He was unmistakably a Manc and he offered to help us find a place. I didn't like him from the off, he seemed a cocky prick to be honest and that's exactly what he turned out to be, telling us to watch ourselves 'because all Peruvians are out to rob you and no one wants to help you or befriend you, they only want your money' by the end of the street we told him we knew where to go from here and left him to go about his daily business. Whilst walking down the street he had told us that he was teaching English in Lima but kept getting in fights and kept getting robbed and he was barred from all the pubs and bars because people did nothing but stare at him. A prize dickhead. You could tell he was one of them 'What you looking at?!' Types.

The place we found to stay seemed nice enough as we dumped our bags and went out to explore the Peruvian beers and ended up in a bar that sold steins so ordered about 3 of them each and went back to our hostal to check out the bar we saw there earlier. We got back and Loz did her usual and quickly went to bed and Johnny and me stayed up drinking at the bar that had a lass serving behind it that was the spitting image of Penelope Cruz. We got drinking with this Irish lad and his girlfriend and their mate. The Irish guy, Dave, was a lighting technician for Disney on Ice and his girlfriend was a skater in the show! That was it, I told them that I'd been to every show around Christmas in Sheffield whilst growing up and I asked them if they knew Goofy 'cos he was my favourite. Unfortunately they said that Goofy tends to keep himself to himself but did say that Minnie Mouse was a right tart and went off with everyone! Suppose you never know what goes off behind closed doors. Dave had been a lighting technician for some unbelievable gigs, including the Stone Roses in Ireland and ACDC. He really was a top bloke and we had a good drink before he had to leave to get his flight to Brazil which is where the next show was, the flight was actually leaving in only a few hours and he was absolutely smashed with us sat on the roof of our hostal looking out onto Lima.

That night we went to bed but got woke up by what I thought was the fire alarm. A massive siren and whirring lights were going round in the room and I was already halfway out the door and down the fire escape in my boxer shorts when a girl in another bunk said that it wasn't the fire alarm, it was a guys alarm clock on his phone that was going off that was in the bunk above me. The guy was bang out on the top of the bed with his trainers still on so I tried to give him a little shake as I was going 'mate...mate....your alarms going off' by this time the whole room of people were awake and this fellas alarm was one of the loudest things I've ever heard. My little shake and quiet words quickly became a slap and a shout but he still did not flinch, I honestly thought he was dead at one point but he grunted and turned over with the alarm still going mental. I tried slapping him some more and shaking him but in the end I climbed on his bed, grabbed his phone and turned the alarm off, I then opened the bedroom door and flung it down the hall. In the morning I got woke up by the idiot again this time looking for his phone. I wouldn't have gave it him back but Laura gave me the eyes so I got up and walked down the hall but his phone wasn't there. As I was walking back up the hall a cleaner just smiled at me and handed me this phone back, so I walked into the room and chucked the phone at this lad. He thought that he had lost it and that I had found it so he was very grateful, saying thank you in a German accent. I just got back in bed and fell asleep again. I woke up later on and Loz, Johnny and me agreed that we were going to find another hostal. As we were packing our bags the German kid came back and said 'Er...waz my ....halarm going off ....lazt night..?' I said that it was and that I tried to wake him up for about twenty minutes to no avail, he woke up the entire hostal and in the end I flung his phone down the hallway. He wasn't so thankful then but he did apologise for his phone going off. What a massive twat.

As we were looking for another hostal on the Internet we found one that was out of town and all the reviews said that it was nice and quiet so we got the bus straight there. The hostal was mint and the owner called Marco had basically just rented out his decent sized flat that housed about 8 beds. We dumped our stuff and got talking to a lad that was in the hostal called Bob who was from Leeds! He was a big Leeds United fan too so naturally we all got on well and I reminded him about the time we stuffed them 5-2 the other year. Bob had been staying at this hostal for a few days and said that tonight there was an English pub quiz on at a bar in town and he wanted to know if we fancied it, which we did. So we got a team together of Bob, Johnny, Loz and me, called ourselves The Yorkshire Puudings. Unfortunately though as Peru were playing in the Confederations Cup the pub quiz was cancelled until Thursday and they had the football on. So we joined in with the crowd and got behind Peru, who managed a battling draw but then after we got a call from Gabriel and his friends wanting to know if we fancied going to a salsa night at a club in Barranco called Sgt. Peppers. We met up with the lads and headed for the club with a few drinks on the way. The salsa night was absolutely class, they had a live band on with a female singer who was going absolutely mental and the packed crowd were loving it. Loz got whisked off by this bloke who looked about 85 but danced like an 18 year old, he said he was a salsa teacher and passed his business card as he was flinging Loz all over. We had a right laugh and again were the only English in the club from what I could see and Gabriel and his mates proper looked after us and after the club finished about 2am we decided to get some beers and sit on the bandstand overlooking the beach. I cannot really remember getting back to Marco's house but I got woke up by Johhny around 10am saying that Marco had been in and we had to be out of the hostal as Marco's place was full for the next couple of nights. So bleary-eyed and with a head absolutely throbbing we had to pack all our stuff and say goodbye to Bob and find another hostal.

Marco recommended one in Miraflores that he had heard was really nice so we jumped in the taxi he kindly arranged for us and headed for our 4th hostal in 5 nights, which is not bad going. We got to the hostal and all went straight to sleep and I promised myself I wasn't drinking for a good while. We woke up and all went for a burger and got back and had a message off Bob asking if we were going to the re-scheduled pub quiz tomorrow night. We decided we would, and bang went the promise of not drinking again!

That morning we woke up to no water in Lima whatsoever, the toilets didn't flush, the showers didn't work and there was no water from the taps. So looking and smelling like crap we headed for the pub to meet Bob but unfortunately, again, the quiz was cancelled due to the water problem so we just had a few beers and decided to call it a night and promised to all meet up in the morning and hire some bikes and actually see Lima in the day and be a bit less nocturnal.

So bright and early we got a knock off Bob who'd come up from Marlon's house and we arranged to hire some bikes from our hostal who waved us off saying if we had any problems we had to give them a call on their mobile and they'd come pick us up. We'd not been gone half an hour when after lobbing stones in the sea from the beach Bob rode through a pile of dog shit and got a flat tyre! We had to walk with Bob and his bike to a bar that we could use the phone to call the hostal who said that we should get a taxi to a petrol station and use the air machine to pump up the tyre!? They had already given us a pump and we did try to pump it up but it was definitely a puncture. The guy from the hostel said Bob should get a taxi with the bike back to them and change the bike for another, so we waited on the beach and ate our pack up while Bob bobbed off. Bob was fuming when he got back as they hadn't even offered to pay half of the taxi fare and started asking him loads of questions about how it happened. Not a very good service really after what they promised but aside from that we had a good day.

We saw the biggest, weirdest looking caterpillar ever in the middle of the pavement, Loz said it looked exactly like the one from Alice in Wonderland......whhoooooo rrrrrrrrrrr yoooooooooou !

We made a curry and watched a film called The Impossible and all balled our eyes out on our last night together.

Johnny left us on Saturday morning to fly back to Guayaquil which is where we would be heading there soon to see him, but first ..........Machu Picchu !!

Hope everyone's fine and dandy back home, really sorry this blogs took so long to post but basically we've been having too much of a good time!

Til the next 'un !

Mick n Loz

X

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Comments

[kerry]

Pfffffff!!!!
Oh my god, I love reading your blogs! It sounds like you are having the most amazing time and are very much in full swing with this travelling lark. been looking into flights for BPM just lately but will be booking closer to the time as Matt has airmiles, and I'm on the scrounge, haha! I cannot wait to see you both, but am very happy reading your updates and knowing you are both so happy and well... apart from the runs at the beginning of this post. xxxxxxxx