Bolivia - La Paz/Copacabana

We arrived in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, during the afternoon of the 24^th of December. We had organized to meet there with our dear friend Pedro. 

For Christmas' Eve we went to a popular restaurant which looked like a French brasserie. And the boys ate a picana (soup made with boiled beef, pork and chicken meats and vegetables) to respect the Bolivian Christmas tradition!

Pedro and Luis at Christmas' Eve

The Picana

Café Ciudad

During the next couple of days we decided to take our Christmas break and rest, preparing the next weeks of travel and watching a few regressive movies on our laptop. As a consequence we did not visit La Paz that much but we wandered a lot in its street full of people at every hour, days and nights. A varied crowd in which we specially noticed groups of women with children, begging for money or trying to sell candy bars or pack of tissues. We could also observed that charity is present and well organized in the city during this Christmas period.

In brief La Paz, the highest capital in the world, is not an unpleasant city but lacks of interest for tourists.

Pictures with Santa on Plaza Murillo

Plaza Murillo

 

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On the shore of Lake Titicaca we spent a few days in the Bolivian Copacabana, a village where departs the daily excursion to the Isla del Sol. Well we paid the day trip only 7$ so we should not have expected much. We took a crappy boat with water leaks for two hours to the northern part of the island.

THE boat

Happily we hiked for a few sunny hours to some Inca ruins. Very enjoyable!

 

To recover from our emotions we found a little restaurant which, surprizingly enough, served a delightful cheese fondue that we savored in ecstasy! :))

Peru - Lima/Lake Titicaca

We spent three days in Lima, the capital and biggest city of Peru, located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. The city is sprawling and chaotic, not very beautiful except for some colonial monuments, and intriguing churches and monasteries.

Plaza de Armas

View over Lima from the Iglesia de Santo Domingo

The monasteries kept some signs of colonial greatness, various tombs and bone-chilling catacombs...

 

Catacombs at the Convento de San Francisco

... while the churches have a funny touch of kitsch for our European eyes:

Christmas crèche (with Barbie's boyfriend in sleeveless tee-shirt!) 

at the Basilica Menor de Nuestra Señora de la Merced de Lima

At the Basilica Menor de Nuestra Señora de la Merced de Lima

Iglesia de San Francisco

The catedral de Lima stands on the spot designated for the city's first church by Francisco Pizarro. This Spanish conquistador founded the city in 1535. His remains rest in a rich chapel of the cathedral. His figure is quite controversial; he is seen as the leader behind the fall of the Inca empire and despised for having ordered the death of the last Inca emperor even if his ransom (a room filled with gold and two filled with silver) was duly paid.

Francisco Pizarro's chapel

Description of Francisco Pizarro's bone injuries

We also made the most of our days in Lima by trying some local specialties:

The ceviche (marinated fish and seafood) maybe the most famous Peruvian dish
next to the cuy (guinea pig)!

The ever-present Inka Kola which tastes like a candy we could not identify

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Anyway travelers in Peru are not attracted by Lima. The city is more like a landing point before heading toward exotic destinations, for example the highest navigable lake in the world, Lake Titicaca (3.808m).

Covering 8.400 square kilometers Lake Titicaca straddles Peru and Bolivia and hosts colorful and historical communities on many islands. On an organized one day trip, we went to meet some islanders living on the Isla flotante (floating island) Los Uros.

Women welcoming us at Manco Capac

In fact Los Uros are rather composed of several islands. Each man-made island is inhabited by a handful of families. During the last few years tourism became an important source of income for those families.

We landed on one of the floating island, Manco Capac, and our guide explained us the local way of life, helped by the head of the community. At the end of the presentation, some women came and took by hand each one of us to show their houses and then try to sell us their craft production. We felt somehow embarrassed and out of place.

Then the head of the community offered us a boat ride against an "extra". Actually the locals told us they called the boat their Mercedes Benz as they make so much money with it! Well we thought the whole experience was enriching as there is still a genuineness in the way this community lives. However we wondered how long it could last.

The local Mercedes Benz

Our second and last stop on the Lake Titicaca was for the Isla Taquile. This island became world-recognized when the UNESCO proclaimed "Taquile and Its Textile Art" a "Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity". And, surprisingly enough, the knitting is only performed by men!

Isla Taquile

Peru - Cuzco/Machu Picchu/Sacred Valley

What an adventure going to Cuzco! We planned everything in advance and had some good surprises. First we thought about going from Lima to Cuzco with a twenty-one hours overnight bus but we finally found a plane ticket for the same price. And the flight took us only one hour! Great find!

Arriving at Cuzco's airport we were harassed by at least thirty travel agency officers which presented themselves as information officials! Well we have read a lot about the tourist capital of Latin America and we tried to be less Gringos (ie walking ATMs) as possible. So we went back to asking the same question at least to three different people (hostels, tourism officers, people in the street, ...) to have a better idea about the correct answer. This way we managed to economize on taxi fares for example. From Cuzco's airport to the city center, we paid one third of what our hostel and some taxi drivers asked us, the only thing we had to do is to walk to the street in front of the airport to get a taxi.

Plaza de Armas by day...

... and by night

Cuzco was the administrative, political and military center of the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. Let's say it bluntly, we were somehow disappointed by Cuzco. The tourism-dominated city center is pretty and full of life. But to visit it fully, we were forced to buy two kinds of boletos: a boleto turístico to enter a handful of museums and some archeological sites in the Sacred Valley, and a boleto religioso to visit the three main churches of the city and a museum of religious art. Those tickets are very expensive for foreigners to visit sites in which photos are forbidden and not that good museums.

One of the many women in Andean clothes trying to have her picture taken in exchange for a tip

Museum of Contemporary Art

Maybe what we enjoyed the most in Cuzco was the clean and cheap tiny vegetarian restaurant, Govinda Lila’s, we found near San Blas Market. The charming lady running it seems to be a local figure hosting the starving local hippies.

Govinda Lila’s

Plaza San Blas

Most of all, Cuzco is the continent’s unquestionable archaeological capital. Our five days in Cuzco and its Sacred Valley were exhausting. It is all about waking up early to catch an early bus and hiking all day long among the remains of the Inca civilization. Worshipping the sun, the Incas built most of their temples and citadels very high or at the top of mountains. Beautiful landscapes and totally worth it!

Bus between Pisac and Urubamba

Sacred Valley

Well talking about an Inca civilization is incorrect as the Incas were only the successive leaders of an empire which expanded from the present-day Ecuador–Colombia border to the area south of Santiago in Chile. The glorious civilization left numerous ruins in the Andean highlands, the most famous of them being the Machu Picchu, presumably built as an estate for an Inca emperor. The site was abandonned at the time of the Spaniard conquest and rediscovered exactly one hundred years ago by the U.S. explorer Hiram Bingham, centennial commemorated by numerous official festivities.

Going to the Machu Picchu is not that easy. The site is located 110 kilometers away from Cuzco. The train from Cuzco to Aguas Calientes (the closest village to the Machu Picchu) is very expensive so most of us take one or various bus to Ollantaytambo, to catch there a train to Aguas Calientes (a one hour and a half train trip). Once in Aguas Calientes, a thirty-minutes bus climbs to the Machu Picchu site.

The sight is amazing especially viewed from top of the formerly cultivated terraces:

On the other side of the site the Huayna Picchu towers above the ruins of the Machu Picchu. It took us more than one hour to climb the Huayna Picchu, a very challenging hike!

Going down the Huayna Picchu

Machu Picchu site viewed from the Huayna Picchu

In the Sacred Valley, we also liked two sites. The various fortified structures on the heights of Pisac are amazing and offers a steep three hours walk from the higher stronghold to Pisac colonial village down in the valley.

Ollantaytambo was an ancient Inca resting place. The narrow cobbled streets of the village are dominated by two massive Inca ruins.