La Paz and beyond

Well, I ended up spending over a week in Bolivia´s bonkers capital, La Paz, and, shamefully, didn´t accomplish much more than visiting virtually every bar and nightclub the place had to offer. Did manage to do some arguably more worthwhile activities, however: most notably a mountain bike trip down the self-proclaimed ´World´s Most Dangerous Road´, which is fairly self-explanatory. From the 5,000m above sea level village of Cumbre, the road plummets about 3,000m in 70km to the tropical village of Corioco. It begins with a wide, paved road, with beautiful vistas of mountain gullys and faraway villages, and soon becomes a treacherously narrow, hairpinned, potholed swamp of a road, strewn with boulders, with yawning chasms leading to certain, instant doom a few inches away from your tyres. Think of the white cliffs of Dover, except somehow more vertical. Oh, and although the road is rarely used by traffic, the chances of turning a corner at a rate of knots to be met headlong by a juggernaut - with a drunken Bolivian driver who has been at the wheel for 12 hours - are not improbable. The guides told us all the horror stories of recent years: a French girl a couple of years ago alighted from her bike as she saw a lorry approaching from the other direction. However, bikers are told to alight to the right, away from the drop. The Gallic unfortunate went the opposite way, took two further steps away from her bike, which happened to be the last steps she ever took. Apparently they heard her screaming from the bottom for three hours as they tried in vain to rescue her. The road is littered with crosses and flowers from the many, many locals who have perished along the way. However, if you are safe, which I was to a fault (it probably would have been quicker for me to walk down with the bike) then you will reach an animal sanctuary at the bottom in the tropical Yunga valley, where you will be served a mediocre lunch in the cafe by a gloomy and slightly camp German man (who was made even more gloomy when I accidentally allowed an eager goat to canter ahead of me into the cafe when I opened the door), who, for anyone familiar with The League of Gentlemen, had a little too much in common with Herr Lipp...

After La Paz, I took the bus up to Copacabana, a touristy town with a hippie community on the southern banks of Lake Titicaca, the ´highest navigable lake in the world´, as every guidebook will tell you. I´m still not quite sure what this means, or if it is something to be particularly proud of. It is also the birthplace of the Inca gods, the sun and the moon, who were seen rising every day seemingly from the lake itself. It is a very sacred place indeed for the Quechua and Aymara people who still live around, and on, the lake. I took a day trip to the Isla del Sol, a beautiful island which I walked across in á few hours. There are so many amazing viewpoints of the lake, and every time you looked at the water it seemed to have changed colour slightly. The best thing about the island was the silence. For a while I just sat enjoying the quiet and the view, twenty yards or so away from an ancient Aymaran woman, wearing the traditional stripy textiles and bowler hat combo that all Bolivian women wear, selling handicrafts at a stall. Not much has changed here in a thousand years, I idly mused, bar the influx of a few tourists. For centuries, life has remained pretty static for the people living here. Then the old woman´s ringtone went off, and she scampered off to retrieve it from her handbag. To further ridicule my naivety, it was that Dom Joly-answering-a-massive-phone-in-a-restaurant ringtone. She was probably getting SMS updates of who was the latest to be slung out of ´Bolivia´s Next Top Model´.

After Copacabana, I headed further north to Arequipa in southern Peru, a stunning city full of colonial architecture and a hot and sunny climate thanks to the mercifully lower altitude. It is sandals and t-shirt weather for the first time on my trip. On the first day I went to a museum which holds one of the few Incan mummies, a teenage girl called Juanita, who was sacrificed at the top of a mountain overlooking Arequipa, and was discovered about 15 years ago. I also had a good look around the Monasteria de Santa Catalina, which is a sprawling 500-year-old convent, described as a ´city within a city´, where the nuns until very recently used to life a life of decadence, with servants and maids, under the pretence that they were living a life of chastity and solitude. Apparently a hardcore sister from the Vatican turned up in the late 1900s and cleaned it up a bit and turned it into a proper nunnery. It is an intriguing place, full of lovely cloisters with orange trees, great halls, mini churches, and some of the best Peruvian art (the Cusco school, 18th and 19th century) in existence.

This week I also set off on a three day trek to the Colca Canyon, which is twice as deep as the (so-called) Grand Canyon. However, about four hours on a bus into the middle of nowhere I came down with a violent bout of food poisoning, leaving me stranded in a remote village (they did have a hostel, thankfully) waiting for the next bus back to Arequipa the following day. I mainly spent my time lying down, throwing up, hallucinating and shivering. So didnt get to do the trek after all... but feeling much better now though.

The next few days will be spent making sure I have recovered from the bug, before sampling some Arequipa nightlife, then getting the bus up to Cuzco, capital of the Inca empire and the biggest gringo hangout in South America... where Warren and Claudia, former work associates of mine, will be arriving...

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