Travels!

So, latest update from Cusco now that I have nothing at all interesting happening in my life. I have now completed nearly 3 weeks of roughing it through Bolivia and Peru, and boy has most of it been rough. This has not been a comfortable vacation at all.Let me recap my travels: We left Buenos Aires on July 11th or 12th, I truthfully dont remember. Anyways, Roberto, my lovable Argentine host dad drove Adam and I to the bus terminal for our 10Am bus to Villazon, Bolivia, right across the Argentine Border. We had cama seats, ones that reclined quite nicely, thankfully, because the ride of 28 hours. Surprisingly, Adam, Joe, and I were the only gringos on the bus. The rest were Bolivians living in Buenos Aires, traveling back to Bolivia, for one reason or another. They all carried with them large packages, bags made from woven colorful material, boxes taped up, duffle bags, and small children on their backs. I don´t know what it is about third world countries but they tend to always travel with dozens of pounds of various packages. I still have no idea what might be in those packages. I am guessing it has to do with goods that they sell in black markets etc. Anyways, the ride starts out with an announcement from the driver that spitting on the floor of the bus is not allowed. What a great start to the trip. The ride actually wasn´t that bad. We arrived in Villazon, did our obnoxious visa processes for Bolivia and crossed into Villazon. We had a couple of hours to kill before our train to Tupiza. Villazon was freezing and so different from Buenos Aires. It was dirty, there were people selling goods all over the streets, street food was everywhere, mules and horses walked around. And most noticeably, we no longer blended in. Buenos Aires was a melting pot of every type, shape, and color of people. Bolivia is 60 percent indigenous. We were now undeniably gringos.Beautiful train ride to Tupiza, 3160 meters above sea level. Look for four day jeep tours. Find one that leaves on Sunday even though it was twice what we were hoping to pay for it. We leave the next morning at 5 AM. Load up the jeep. Leave with a Spaniard, Fede, from Madrid who was traveling alone. Our guide, Santos, was a jolly little Bolivian man with a big Toyota 4 wheel drive. A young girl, probably about 16 or 17 years old, came along as our cook. I won´t go into detail about the tour but it brings us to areas of Bolivia so unhospitable it is unbelievable. Our hostels at night were crude at best. Most were cement buildings with hard beds, no heat, no hot water, no electricity in the middle of nowhere. We used candle light to eat dinner at night and tried to crash at 8PM so that we wouldn´t die of the cold. Most of the trip we were between 3000 mts and 4600 mts above sealevel. We saw very little vegetation, were freezing cold the entire time, and had trouble breathing in the oxygen thin air. We did, however, see some amazing abandoned villages, mines, beautiful mountains, lagoons, swam in hot springs, photographed flamingos, lounged on salt flats and cruised past boiling geysers. We saw parts of Bolivia that most Bolivians have never seen as they are only accessed by four wheel drive vehicles. There were set backs. Two flat tires, 8 hours a day in a cramped car, horrible music, broken windows, no ATMs when we needed money. But after four days of little sleep, uncomfortable conditions, no showers, we came away with an amazing view of highland Bolivia as a barren, vast, and largely untouched land full of mineral wealth and beautiful landscapes.Our next stop, after the end of the jeep tour, was Potosi to see the Silver mines. We took a cramped and terrifying bus from Uyuni to Potosi that cruised up and down gravel roads for hours and hours winding around corners that dropped down hundreds of feet below. Potosi is one of the highest city in the world at 4090 mts above sea level and is dwarved by a massive mountain, cerro rico, which has provided a living for the inhabitants of the city since the Spanish colonial rule. The mountain used to be full of pure silver and made Potosi one of the richest cities in the world, starting in 1546, and reaching populations of 200,000 at times dwarfing London and Paris with its booming population. Currently, the mountain has no pure silver but specks of silver that is blended in with other minerals in the rocks. About 100,000, or 70 percent of the population, work in or around the mines, and many work 8 to 10 hour days in horrible conditions for 50 bolivianos a day (8 dollars). We took a horrifying tour of the mine. It was a hellish place that is pitch black, full of dust, cramped, and uncomfortable. We bought, as gifts for the miners, 96 percent pure alcohol, cigarettes, coca leaves, soda, and dynamite. The liquor and cigarettes we gave to a 15 and 16 year old who had both spend a few years respectively working in the mines. Many children start when they are 13 working for their parents. This mine is unique, in that most of the mine is cooperative or individuals own parts of the mine that they work for their own wealth. The upside is that the families get to keep what they find, but the downside is, if they don’t find anything then they can often go months without making a single penny.
After the hellish 3 hours in the mine, crawling through spaces just wide enough to fit a single person, breathing in toxic dust, avoiding two ton carts that race around on tracks inside the mine, braving temperatures from 10 to 30 degrees celcius (yes, temperatures reach the 90s in the mine), we reached fresh air, a welcome sight after such a trip. It was, however, an extremely eye opening experience that I would recommend all to do once and then never again. For anybody who wants to know what life is like for the miners, there is a video called The Devil´s Miners about the bolivian silver mines that I heard is very good.
After Potosi we headed to the capital, La Paz to get a taste of city life. La Paz is a wild place. It is build in a massive valley and surrounded by snow capped mountains. The city itself is actually pretty small compared to the Buenos Aires that I am used to. There is a serious lack of good restaurants and the center is very small and tourist heavy. There really was little to do there and I was not impressed with the food. The highlight, however, was biking on death road.
Death Road is a road that winds through the mountains from La Paz to Coroicos and was the only road that connected the two locations up until 2006. It is called death road because during peak traffic years approx. 200 to 300 a year died from falling off the cliffs. The road was build in 1930s during the Bolivian Paraguayan Chaco war by Paraguayan prisoners and descends from 15.260 ft to 3900 ft at the bottom, crossing from high windswept mountainous plains to lush rainforest. The road is so dangerous because it has cliffs that drop nearly 2,000 ft into the valley below and is often never wider than 10 ft. It lacks guard rails and during the rainy season often has cave ins. On the road, the traffic drives on the left, not the right, like the rest of Bolivia, allowing the driver on the outside to see where his outside wheel is in relation to the sharp drop off. However, due to fog, poor visibility, mud, and just plain stupidity, people continue to die each year as they plunge off the cliff into the abyss below. Just a few months ago an Israeli tourist was biking the road, tried to stop as a bus came towards her, lost control, and disappeared below. She died upon impact.
Mountain biking on the death road has become a new tourist attraction for backpackers from around the world. There are probably 15 or 20 competing agencies that exist in La Paz competing for your business. The prices, interestingly enough, range from 30 US to 150 US. I wouldn´t trust the 30 US agencies. They must be cutting corners somewhere, probably on safety measures, and that is something I would rather not do. We settled with Vertigo biking, a comfortable medium price of 70. The most important aspect, in my opinion, was that the bike have good disc brakes because the majority of the trip is spent braking. We left early in the morning, bused for an hour and a half to the cumber, the highest point, at 15,260, and started our ascent. The first 25 km or so are tarred road through the most gorgeous valleys. We reached speeds of 45 km per hour on the bikes as we cruised down to the first checkpoint. It was an adrenaline rush. I could do it all day long. We got to a checkpoint, paid our 25 boliviano entrance fee, hopped back into the van, drove 8 km uphill (because it would obviously be impossible for us to bike that far uphill) and started death road. It was a wild experience. As you descend on the road, not looking over the side, obviously, because you would freak out, the scenery changes so rapidly. The temperature rose quite substantially. The smells changed. We descended through a layer of cloud cover. Stopped every once in a while as a group to take pictures and to explain where each tourist had died as he plummeted over the edge. About 2 tourists die a year doing the trek. So far 18 people have fallen off on bicycles – 15 tourists and 3 Bolivian guides. The trip was amazing, one of the most invigorating and adrenaline filled things I did in South America. We finished up the trip with a single track, steep stone filled little trail to the bottom. I wiped out, however didn´t hurt myself. I got a taste of mountain biking though and would love to do more in the future. It was a lot of fun.
We left La Paz on the way to Copacabana, on Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable salt water lake in the world (at 12,500 ft). The town itself was very charming and very hippy. Lots of vegetarian restaurants. Very tourist centered. We headed out to Isla del Sol, an island in the lake, and the mythical birthplace of the sun for the Incans. The island has various ruins on it that are heavily visited by tourists. I was sick for the majority of the time, so I didn´t terribly enjoy my stay but it was beautiful.
We spent a night on the island, headed back the next day, caught a bus to Puno, Peru, on the other side of Lake Titicaca, stayed a night, and saw the floating islands the next day. The floating islands are made of woven reeds and are literally islands with houses on them where people fish and subsist largely on the tourists that visit the islands. It was terribly exploitative, over priced, and generally not very enjoyable. After the islands we took a late bus to Cusco to search for a Machu Picchu trek.
Cusco is a very modern city and very heavily tourist oriented. Our search for a Salkantay Trek (not the Inca trail, which is prohibitively expensive (600 plus dollars)) led us to various agencies that all gave us the same exact pitch. Competitive prices. Okay. We chose one agency for 155 dollars, 5 day, 4 nights, that took us up over the Salkantay pass. The next morning we left at 430. The trek was unorganized. The agency had lied to us about our group. We didn´t have one. We were bunched in with other groups from other agencies and had a rather dull tour guide named Edy who was more interested in hitting on the French girl on our trek than on explaining what we were seeing. There were too many people in our group too. 10 Israelis, 2 Brazilians, 3 Americans and a French girl. I never need to hear Hebrew again. Ugly language. The first night we climbed to the base of a massive snow capped peaks and camped in freezing cold tents on a hard ground. Needless to say, I didn´t sleep much. In the 5 days we covered about 15 to 25 km a day hiking. The second day we had to climb up through a steep mountain pass next to the gorgeous snow capped Salkantay. It was tough going, as the air was thin and the climbing was steep. But, luckily, we had horses that lugged 5 kilos of our gear on their backs the entire trip. The third and fourth day were spend mainly descending from the mountain pass into jungle until Aguas Calientes, the town at the base of Machu Picchu. The town is ugly, smelly, overpriced, and overall a huge disappointment. However, Machu Picchu made up for it.
Day 5, Machu Picchu. We got up at 240 after a few hours of sleep and booked it to the entrance to Machu Picchu. They had changed the rules and now made tourists wait at the base of the mountain before their ascend at 5 oclock. Apparently a girl had died the day before during the mad rush to the top so they changed the rules. We waited at the bottom as tourists poured in. By 430 there were probably 500 or so people in line. The reason we were there so early is because only the first 400 get to ascend to the top of Wayna Picchu, the mountain that rises nearly 1000 ft higher than Machu Picchu and was the location of a guard tower to protect Machu Picchu. People were anxious, as everybody wanted to make it to the top first. At about 445, the gates were opened and everybody made a mad dash towards the steps. The steps that rise to Machu Picchu were laid in the incan days and were the main entrance to the mountain. They have recently built a road that helps to bus fat lazy tourists up for 14 US dollars (which could get you transportation, housing, and food for a day in Peru). Adam, Joe, Maud (the French girl) and I raced up the steps, passing people every few minutes or so. We climbed for 45 minutes vertical, no breaks, no rest, at about 6000 ft above sealevel. What a work out. But, it paid off. We were in the first 10 to reach the top.
Machu Picchu was gorgeous, even though we lost our guide and just wandered by ourselves. The architecture is amazing. They had advanced irrigation systems, terraced farms, guard houses, churches, astrology stations, and many many llamas. At 10 we ascended probably the scariest mountain I have ever hiked, Wayna Picchu to give us some of the most spectacular and breathtaking views of the valleys below. Amazing day. Amazing trip.
I am spending my last few days in Cuzco now, wasting time and waiting for my flight home. I am ready to leave and enjoy a few weeks of Maine summer before I head back to school! Amazing trip. Never though I would make it to Machu Picchu, or Bolivia, or Peru for that matter. But now, I have done it all and am extremely glad I have.