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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…
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And So To Machu Picchu
I always think there’s something supremely auspicious about train travel, especially pulling out of or in to a great city, it just feels so momentous. This is particularly true today as the Peru Rail train hauls slowly up the steep inclines out of Cusco, headed for one of the World’s most spectacular rail journeys through the Sacred Valley to Machu Picchu, a wonder of the modern world. And all this on a significant birthday for Michaela, too. It takes a full half hour for the train to be free of Cusco, the rail track repeatedly switchbacking as it climbs its way up and over the mountains surrounding the city. Once…
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The Wonderful City Of Cusco
Sometime during 1993 the Peruvian Government took it upon themselves to draw up a national constitution. Within this document was a declaration that the city of Cusco should be officially recognised as Peru’s Historic And Cultural Capital, so providing this lovely city with an accolade to match its indisputable and enduring appeal. In truth, it really is a lovely city, especially the narrow cobbled streets which gravitate on steep hills away from Cusco’s beating heart, the bustling Plaza de Armas. The cathedral, dedicated to the Virgin of the Assumption and the almost as large Iglesia de la Compañia de Jesus dominate the two sides of the square which aren’t taken…
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Cusco & The Rainbow Mountain: Life At Over 11,000 Feet
So now we enter the first part of this journey – there’s plenty more coming – where altitude sickness is a looming enemy, so as a result we have developed a strategy long before the day we arrive in Cusco. Flying in from Puerto Maldonado adds to the risk, coming straight from low lying wetlands to a city at 3,400 metres in less than an hour gives no opportunity for graduation, just a steep learning curve in which a large dose of being sensible is called for. We’re not always good at being sensible. Consequently we hatch a plan. There’s a certain regime to follow for the first 48 hours…
