After speeding through Peru, we've now arrived in La Paz, Bolivia. A grimey and chaotic city, but its liveliness definitely makes up for it. There are street stalls everywhere, selling everything and nothing you'd ever want, and traffic and people all around. We're staying at a hostel in the Witches' Market, where they sell lots of potency ointments, strange wines and llama fetuses. We only arrived yesterday, but we've toured most of the city center, going through the black market and the main street today, visiting a modern art museum with a Che Guevara exhibition (focused on how commercialized his image has become) and a cinema (we watched Lucky Number Slevin; not bad) on the way.
Before coming here, we visited the Titicaca Lake, from both the Peruvian and the Bolivian side. The departure point to the lake on the Peruvian side was an extremely ugly city, Puno. From there we took a tour of a few hours to the floating islands on the lake, which the Uru people have built solely out of reeds. The islands are made of the reeds, the peoples' houses are made of the reeds, their boats are made of them, and you can even eat parts of them. The islands have to be repaired twice every month, though, and living in the middle of the lake can't be an easy life.
After spending a night in Puno, we crossed the border to Bolivia (where we were 'checked for drugs' by the Peruvian immigration police who very suspiciously sniffed the Pringles packet I had bought in the store next door and tried to steal some of Alex' money) and headed to the little lakeside town of Copacabana. This was a much more pleasant place than Puno, and we spent the evening there watching a local football tournament and drinking cheap Bolivian wine.
The next day we took the boat to Isla del Sol, an island that looked as if it belonged in the Mediterranean. This is supposedly from where the Inca people (or Quechua, as they apparently are supposed to be called, since the Inca were the kings) sprang and is dotted with old ruins. Having regained consciousness after climbing up the stairs to the village on the southern end of the island in which we were staying (we were almost at 4,000 m at this point) we started off on a hike to the north that was to take several hours. A siesta overlooking a bay with emerald green water was included, not bad. When we'd reached the north part of the island, and passed spectacular view after spectacular view, it was already quite late and walking all the way back did not seem too tempting, so we decided to take a boat instead. A man from a village took us and a French couple on his boat since the regular one wasn't running this late. Off we went into the lake that had started to change quite dramatically from the calm self it had been when we arrived at Isla del Sol. Suddenly it had become very windy and though it constantly felt like the waves were about to topple the boat over, the owner just smiled at us every time we looked at him. We made it all the way to the bay below our village though, but this is when the trouble started. For some reason, the man decided to put the boat with its side to the waves and told us to jump off the boat while he had half his body on the helm and half of it on the pier. Everything happened way too fast, and while I was on the side of the boat, it started tipping over and when it was halfway on its side, I decided it was probably better to jump into the water than it flip over entirely. Luckily, the water was only waist deep here and even my camera survived. Charles lost his sunglasses, but he was able to retrieve them the next day and after a shower and some food I regained some warmth, so it's all good.
Tomorrow we'll hopefully be off to Potosí, a mining town 11 hours away from La Paz. Hopefully my iPod will have stopped being stupid for the bus ride there.
