Blog entry, March 31st 2004
Trip Start
Oct 17, 2003
1
15
34
Trip End
May 22, 2004
San Jose,
Province of San Jose,
Costa Rica
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
From Cusco I took a bus to Puno at the Lago Titicaca. For those of you who don't know, that's the highest navigable lake in the world (they say...). The landscape is spectacular, the lake is huge and it's just generally nice over there (and the ride from Cusco through the Andes is amazing as well). From Puno my journey continued to La Paz in Bolivia. The city is quite ghetto, people bustling around and streetmarkets every day. It lies in something like a hole, meaning it's surrounded by populated hills up to 400m higher than the town itself. That's quite a view, especially with a 6400m high mountain looming in the background!
I visited the world's highest ski-lift too (at 5300m) and threw some snowballs down the cliffs there. Thanks to a bad piece of pizza I got pretty sick (the hotelrooms toilet was pretty busy for a while...) and I had to shift my departure for Uyuni by a day. I left La Paz in the late afternoon and was supposed to arrive in Uyuni at 0600 the next morning. Unfortunately another bus got stuck in a river, which made it impossible for us to continue. After some hard work (and thinking) by the locals, they finally (after three hours) managed to pull the other bus out and a passage was made by moving stones into the river, so got going again and arrived in Uyuni at 0930. Forgot to mention that the bus was packed, half my seat was taken by my neighbours stuff, my knees were about an inch under my chin, the temperature was about two degrees (and you're supposed to sleep in these conditions???)...
Uyuni is close to a big saltlake (one third the size of Switzerland) and I checked it out by way of a three-day tour, which would leave me in San Pedro de Atacama (Chile) at the end. The lake was truly amazing, huge really. We would drive for one hour, in a straight line, without anything closer than five kilometers. It was also very strange because I just couldn't believe that the white stuff I was seeing was salt and not snow. It just looked so much like a frozen lake covered in snow... There's also a hotel built entirely of salt, unbelievable. On the tour we saw other things as well, like volcanoes, weird rock formations in the desert (arbol de piedra), lagoons of different colors (red, green, turquoise) with flamingos, hot springs, geysirs, mummies, etc... The views were absolutely stunning and it was the best trip I've done so far (besides Tikal anyway)!! The nights we spent at altitudes of over 4000m, so it got really really cold! But the clear skies with thousands of stars and the cristal-clear milky way definately made up for the cold temperatures.
At my next stop, San Pedro, I took it easy for a few days, enjoying a nice hotelroom with TV, trying to get rid of the flu I caught in Bolivia. I still managed to go on another tour to some geysirs and hot springs and with Kellie (who I met again briefly) I rented a bike and we went sandboarding in the Valley of Death. And to complete things a bee thought it must climb into my can of coke, right before I take a sip, so I ended up having it sting me on the inside of my lip, which was very painful (Kel, no you know how it feels, right?!). After San Pedro I travelled to Iquique, where I spent a couple of days relaxing at the beach. It felt good to be near the ocean again and the city had a McDonalds, so Raffi was extremely happy... ;-)
Soon it was time to leave Chile, so by taking two buses and one collectivo I managed to get to the second-largest city in Peru, Arequipa. I didn't like that town too much (besides that it was a good place for present shopping), thus I joined a two-day tour of Cocha Canyon. This turned out to be quite a work-out... Within 24 hours we hiked a height difference of 2900m!! The first day (after a five hour busride from 0200 until 0700) we descended first 1100m, uphill 300m to have lunch and downhill again for another 300m. We stayed at an oasis at the bottom of the canyon, in bamboo huts with comfy beds but no electricity or running water. Had to get up at 0230 to climb uphill for three and a half hours, covering 1200m in altitude! Well, sore muscles, a couple of blisters and the promise never to go hiking again, those were the results of that trip.
I met Kel again in Arequipa (thanks for the help while shopping, guapa!) and together we decided to travel to Pisco, before going back to Lima. The busride was supposed (again, supposed...) to last for thirteen hours, but after six of 'em we suddenly found ourselves in some sort of traffic jam. Closer inspection revealed that a cliff had collapsed and now completely blocked the road ahead (the Panamericana!). Although a bulldozer was at work it didn't look too promising. Eventually the road was cleared after six hours, which we spent sitting around in the shadow or trying to get some sleep in the bus. So we finally arrived in Pisco at 0230, the whole trip lasted around twenty hours. No big deal, really, as we quickly found a hostel to relax and sleep.
The day after Kel and I joined a half-day tour to visit a couple of things close to Pisco. A boat took us to an island, which was full of marine birds. There must have been more than a billion of 'em, for real! They even collect the birds droppings and sell it as fertilizer. There were also a lot of sealions, who by the way make a lot of noise when they're hanging around on the beach, and some penguins. Cute...
In the afternoon we took a bus to Lima and the next day I flew to San Jose, one more time. Here I am now and tomorrow I'll fly to Miami to start my Tour de USA. I still haven't decided if I will rent or buy a car, but hopefully that will be resolved before Sunday.
