buses and more buses…
Sunday, April 9th, 2006The last 2 days have been filled with buses, and taxis and vans…I left Cusco early Friday morning to get to Puno which is by Lake Titicaca. The bus ride was interesting and I sat with these 2 super hippy Canadian travellers, they didn’t go to Machu Pichu because it was too touristy instead went off into the hills around it for week and just wandered around with random people living there, awesome. And I had this crazy little kid come sit next to me who smelt worse that anything and had a crazy withered hand. He kept tapping my arm every few minutes and pointing out things to me like cars, trains, buildings….weird. Spent the afternoon just walking around and getting some food. As I mentioned my eftpos card wont work so I rung the bank back in NZ and tried to explain it to the lady “my card isn’t working”
“well just come in and we´ll replace it”
“I’m in Peru…”
“Piha?”
“No Peru”
“Parnell?”
“NO, Peru as in South America”
“hmmm well that’s a problem, try again tomorrow otherwise I don’t know”
wow thanks for your help….
anyway still haven’t tried it but have travellers cheques so I should be sweet. In the morning I went on a tour to Los Uros, these floating islands made of reeds. They only still exist because of tourists so it was like a big museum a but strange but still interesting. Everything is made of reeds and the island s need another layer put down every 3 weeks to stop them from rotting away. We went on a reed boat and ate reeds, very weird.
I was planning to catch a bus to La Paz but there were no tourist buses going in the afternoon so they told me to catch a public bus to this place and another bus to the border then to La Paz…sounds easy enough. Well public buses are a lot different to tourist buses, much much smaller…only a 2 hour ride to the boarder though then I had no idea what to do but this guy in a bike taxi thing took me to the border and showed me where to go and where to change my money. Going through the Bolivian border was interesting. 5 huge guys with guns took me into this little room and went through my day pack, taking out all my money, taking photos of themselves with my digital camera…when they found my British passport that was a big drama trying to explain the I had 2 passports in my no Spanish. Eventually they let me go, gave me a hug…interesting experience. From there the taxi guy dropped me off a pointed to these vans who were yelling ´La Paz´so I just jumped in one. They put my bag on the roof and I had one of those moments like what the hell am I doing…but we got to La Paz only a couple of hours. Then I had the address of this hostel and the van dropped me on the side of the road in the middle of the suburbs in the dark, pointing to a van and said it would go there. Super. luckily there was a guy who spoke english with his girlfriend who said they’d come with me and show me where to go. So they took me right to the door of the hostel which was so lucky because I’m not sure what I would have done otherwise! So then I get in the hostel and its full!! But again luckily there were this group of America girls who live in Bolivia with the peace corps and had a spare bed in their room so I stayed with them and went out for tea to this super flash, and super cheap restaurant. Soooo made it to Bolivia, La Paz is totally crazy lots going on so just going to wander for the day. Everything is so cheap it’s great!
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