^8th July, 2003.

Hi there.

08/07/2003

Hi all,

Hope everyone is well. We stayed over in Aguas Caliente for the night after and bathed in the hot springs there (hence the name Hot Water). We caught a bus back to Cusco and then immediately boarded a bus for Puno on Lake Titicaca the highest navigable lake in the world at 3850 meters. The air is thin up around here and so the sky is a beautiful azure blue, the breathing is a little difficult after running up a couple of flights of stairs and you have to wear a hat all the time because the sun is so strong even though it is still quite cold. In fact the temperature drops by about 20 degrees as soon as the sun sets. You have to have about five layers on when going for dinner and you have to jump under four blankets when you are getting into bed.

In Puno we had two trips in one day. The first to a set of floating reed islands inhabited by the Uros people, a race of people who were never conquered by the Incas because they moved out to the middle of the lake to live on the floating islands.

In the afternoon we caught a bus to a place called Silistani where there are a collection of huge funerary towers built by the Incas to honour their dead warrior chiefs. Each of the doors face east towards the rising sun. The following morning we caught another bus to Copacabana, which was about a 5 hour trip. We got really nervous about 5k from the border as we read in Catharine's Lonely Planet guide book that Irish people needed a visa to enter Bolivia and we hadn't got one.

Fortunately as usual the guide book was wrong and we sailed through immigration without so much as a raised eyebrow.

We were quite relieved to be in Bolivia as a whole month in Peru and having to put up with their people has been more than a little tedious. We hardly met a person who was genuinely friendly. They all seemed to want to get our money in the fastest way possible. We found it near impossible to look at the local artisan crafts as you are hastled to buy if you step foot within a 20 foot radius of any stall. In Bolivia the people leave you be with only a polite Buenas Dias and then you can wander around their shop or stand by their stall looking at the merchandise for as long as you wish.

We didn't let our guard down though but I think we only needed one set of eyes to look out for potential thieves rather than six pairs of eyes.

The day after we visited Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) where according to Inca Legend the Sun was born and where the first Inca King set off from to plant his golden rod in the fertile valley where the gods had predicted would be the centre of the Inca empire and where now stands Cusco.

After that we caught a bus to La Paz the highest capital city in the world.

The trip to La Paz involves getting up quite earlier and packing into a local bus with every-one else. There is not much in the way of exclusive tourist buses here and rightly so. The bus journey takes you along the southern shore of Lago Titicaca and then to a narrow channel between two parts of the lake. Here you must get of the bus and onto a small lancha which takes you across the lake. Minutes later you can watch the bus being transported across on a shallow barge while in the background colourful sails carry fishermen out to the dark blue waters of the lake whilst a backdrop of snow capped peaks finishes the canvas. It was cold while we waited in the shadows as the sun had yet to climb over some nearby hills but a band played some martial music to troops heading for the Peruvian border and this helped raise our spirits.

From there the bus climbed again as La Paz is located high in the Altiplano where the air is thin and it takes a lot of energy to do anything. Bolivia play all their soccer matches in La Paz. They have never been beaten at home and that included every south and central American team. If they ever get to host the world cup then believe it, they will come away with the trophy. We passed across high grassy planes and our first sight of the city was a brown haze on the horizon. This is the pollution that manages to escape from the bowl that the city is built in. The bus came to the lip of the bowl and below us and spreading up the sides of all the surrounding hills was the capital of the poorest country in south America.

Slan,

E&S