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Potosi: Down Into The Mine Then Down From The Mountains
Only about half the seats are taken as the bus ambles out of Uyuni despite company reps repeatedly bellowing the name of the destination so we think at first that we’re in for a comfortable ride. What we don’t know is that the bus will, in the first few miles, make multiple stops and take on passengers until not only every seat is full but so is the aisle. Not so comfortable after all and not in the same class as Cruz del Sur in Peru, but we’re on our way to Potosi, one of the highest cities in the world. Four hours later a battered old taxi takes us…
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The Salar de Uyuni: Part 2
We’ve survived the bitter cold night. The Danish boys Johannes and Valdemar have also slept well, Max is feeling a little unwell. Carlos bursts through the door in his usual animated style, enthusiastically running through today’s programme. Edwin is out in the cold, filling the fuel tank from the spare can and letting air from the Landcruiser’s tyres. Over the course of the three days Edwin will drive over 1,100 kilometres, precious little of it on anything resembling a road. There’s dirt roads in the sand, there’s rough rocky tracks, there’s sections where two tyre tracks are the only clue as to the way – and there’s times where he…
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The Salar de Uyuni: Part 1
We are lucky enough to have seen many wonderful places around the world on our travels, yet this journey through Peru and Bolivia had already become one of our best ever trips even before we headed towards Uyuni. From Uyuni we set out on a 3-day journey which took us to some of the most incredible places and unbelievable natural sights we have ever seen, so much so that Michaela commented that it felt like we were moving from one National Geographic cover to another. A truly amazing journey with so many pinch-yourself moments…. When we first heard about the remote town of Uyuni and its incredible salt flats, we…
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From The Sublime To The Surreal: The Enigma Which Is La Paz
We enter the city of La Paz and find ourselves in a place where lurking just beneath the veneer of an ordinary large city there are strange stories, mysterious behaviours and rituals from a different era. This is a city where dozens of witches still practice, where shrivelled animal embryos are on sale, where families buy human skulls and keep them in their home for good luck, where a museum celebrates and documents the history of cocaine, where public transport is a network of cable car lines. After all these years of knowing smugly that La Paz is the highest capital city in the world, it turns out that it’s…
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Getting It Wrong In Bolivia: Copacabana, The Sun & The Moon
The cross-border bus is only a few minutes late leaving Puno, skirting Titicaca’s shores and trundling towards a checkpoint which turns out to be one of our easier border crossings, just two quick passport stamps and we’re through into Bolivia. Our next destination appears below us down the steep hillside, nestled attractively around a lakeside bay, greeting us with the most biting icy wind we have so far felt on this trip. This is going to need a ramp-up in sensible clothing. The town’s name is Copacabana, our home here is called Sultan Suites, which leaves Barry Manilow and Dire Straits competing for occupation of my ear worm. Our accommodation…
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The Floating Islands Of Titicaca
Michaela wants me to tell you about face cream. And hand cream. Et cetera. At these altitudes they behave rather differently from normal – every time Michaela removes the lid from a tube, there’s a rocket launcher of a squirt of white liquid capable of hitting the far wall of a hotel bedroom without so much as a gentle squeeze on the tube, like the contents can’t wait to escape. No doubt there’s a scientific reason for this phenomenon but for now Michaela is busy finding ways to clean cream off everything from quilt covers to wallpaper. Today’s cream coating for the bedroom furniture is in Puno, our last stop…
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Condors In The Colca Canyon
A trip out to the Colca Canyon is on most travellers’ must-do lists while staying in Arequipa, but Michaela plays a blinder by finding a 2-day tour which is linear rather than circular and ends in the place which is, handily, our next destination anyway. So we leave Arequipa in the morning sunshine with the canyon and its resident condors in our minds, hoping we get lucky enough to see one or two. We head now back up into high altitudes, in fact at no time in the next nineteen days will we be below 3,400 metres above sea level. We’ve dubbed this part of the trip “the cold section”…
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Inside The White City: Tales From Arequipa
Ever since we arrived in Cusco we have seen, in virtually every main plaza and next to most tourist sites, women in traditional dress holding on to a cute baby alpaca, inviting tourists to pay a fee to pose for photographs with the two of them. The baby alpaca is impossibly cute, the lady resplendently colourful, but do NOT be tempted to part with cash. The horror behind this facade is that the alpaca has been taken from its mother while it should still be suckling, and is then fed artificial milk as a substitute. Horrifically, this kills the little treasure and most of these exploited animals die in pain…
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Sex And Empanadas: Farewell To The Sacred Valley
Mystique surrounds our village of Ollantaytambo. We wake each morning to the sound of rushing water and the sight of the Inca terraces looking down from the towering mountain, the early morning sun creeps over the summits and, although we can’t see it, we know that just a short distance away the sundial obelisk erected by the Incas centuries ago is still announcing the dawn of another day just as it did back then. Ollantaytambo stirs. Guides for those on the Inca Trail pack up their tents on the green next to the ancient Punku Punku gateway ready for the next leg; cafe owners clean the dust from windows; souvenir…
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In The Land Of The Incas: The Secrets Of The Sacred Valley
There’s no way we want to rush through El Valle Sagrada, the Sacred Valley, in the way that many seem to do. Some call in briefly if opting for the bus/train combo rather than the full length train journey in order to speed up the journey to Machu Picchu, and, much worse, it’s even possible to do a one-day excursion from Cusco which, given the distances and the number of sites involved, must be both a long day and a rushed agenda. Rather than either of these, we decide that after first embracing Machu Picchu we will take a few days to explore this magnificent valley which was the spiritual…
