So I'm home now, but I have more I want to write, so I'm gonna keep going for two or three more posts. I flew back to Chicago, chilled with my family for three days, then made a mad dash across country to my new home for the winter, Kings Beach at Lake Tahoe.
I forgot to write about Juliaca before! After enjoying the sparsely populated jungle, cloud forests, and barren altiplano for two weeks, Juliaca was a surprise treat. It is on no tourist's list of things to see in Peru, since it has no ruins or museums or anything, but I think it's awesome! It's really for the altiplano people of Peru, I saw maybe one other white person in that 100,000+ city. It really is on the gringo trail, you just have to make a choice to stop there.
Some videos of the market in Juliaca,
It felt like a piece of Lima's Barrios Altos neighborhood on a tract of flat land at 12,000ft. That means the streets were packed with people and the open air market stretched on for (a few) kilometers in all directions. And since it was above 3000m elevation, everyone was gentle and friendly, unlike Barrios Altos. People bent over laughing about my height, but nobody tried to hustle me.
A few kilometers before Juliaca I saw the first white person since 14 days previous in Puerto Maldonado, also bicycle touring! I greeted him with a hearty "HOLA GRINGO!!!" He started speaking German to me, further melting my mind. He was from Berlin, and he was much more of a soldier cyclist than I. He had full serious biking clothes, a helmet, bike shoes and clipless pedals, a bike computer, etc. I was dressed in a stupid alpaca sweater with stick figures on it. Someone told me this made it clear I was a tourist. My backpack and other crap was lashed on my handlebars because I broke a spoke in the rear wheel the day before. No helmet, just a Arlington Park horseracing baseball hat. No cycling tights for me, just cutoff slacks.
This guy, Andre, did not have a sense of humor really, he was all business, Lima to La Paz, head down and hauling! He did tell me about a time he got lost and ended up on an old Inca trail that traversed over some peaks and made his effing life! I wish I would have had him point that out on a map.
We rolled into Juliaca together and I was intrigued by this huge outdoor market. He didn't have time to explore, just four days to get to La Paz, so we parted ways.
In the market there was some decent 1/4 chicken for 9am, a huuuuge mud pit in the middle of it all, tons of buses waiting to be filled, and the first sizeable bike parts selection I had seen since 3 weeks earlier in Cusco. I got some great neon mudflaps with a picture of a snarling tiger face on them. Everyone had these in the altiplano.
There was also the biggest coca leaves dealer I saw on the trip. They had massive bales of coca leaves for 80 soles, sold by old ladies. I turned them down.
This is where comical bowler hats made an appearance in traditional women's dress. I chuckled about that about every day. Apparently someone in the early 1900s ordered tons of them from Europe by mistake, and then convinced Aymara women to wear them, and they still are a fad to this day.
I really should have stayed a night in Juliaca, but I was set on getting to Puno and resting there, so I just passed through quickly. Halfway to Puno I stopped to sugar up, and these people told me about some ruins nearby, Sillustani. They made it sound like it was really close, like 5km away. It turned out to be more like 25km.
I took off on this choppy dirt road towards some town in the distance, still sporting a broken rear spoke. This was really worrying the whole time, once one spoke fails, more can quickly follow, resulting in a really unstable squirrelly wheel.
I asked a bus for directions to the ruins, and they used a preposition I didn't know, so I smiled and nodded and kept on to the town. I biked through a field up to a house built out of rocks, and the women in bowler hats looked like they were really over doing it with their traditional dress. I really don't know what happened next, but I blame the towns people. There was a group of Peruvians outside the house, and I distinctly asked, "Is this the ruins? Is this a museum?" and they fucking said YES! Then they started telling me I could park my bike in the small courtyard of the stone house, so I did. One of the guys had a button down blue shirt, I thought he was the tour guide. I started taking pictures of stuff.
Next, suddenly, the blue shirted man and some kids wanted me to walk with them to the parque. I thought this was a tour of the ruins, but it was all complete fiction in my mind! I just rolled up to some random house in the countryside with the neighbors outside talking, and they walked me over to the sports park to play or watch soccer. I realized it wasn't a tour once I saw the soccer field, and then couldn't figure out a polite way to leave, so we sat talking for a while. I couldn't stop thinking about the $200 USD in my bike seat, and my passport back with my bike.
Eventually, my plans of getting to Puno that night became clear to everyone, and we all saw some rain coming, so I got free of my friends and rushed 10km onward to the ruins. Compared to this experience, the ruins were really boring and not worth it, but the mobs of Japanese and Europeans seemed to like it.
So I made it to Puno, stashed my stuff, then took a bus back to Juliaca for a day with my bike. The bus cost 60 cents to go 40km, and at that price they wanted that thing full! Not only did they yell out Juliaca! at the bus stop 50x, they continued as the bus slowly made its way through Puno's streets. And they got it full, no problem. I'm not sure how that worked, everyone in Puno knows where the bus stop is, but I guess people miles away from there can also get sold on an impulse idea of going to Juliaca.
I had no idea where the bus let me off, I just started biking randomly without recognizing a thing for three hours. The thing I needed most was a spoke, so I hit up the bike district of sorts. It was all full of new Chinese Walmart bikes, nobody there knew how to work on them or get parts, but some lady was willing to disappear for 20 minutes off to somewhere, leaving me in charge of the shop it seemed. I tried to sell one of her bikes for 20 soles ($6), but no dice.
Eventually she came back with a spoke that was too long, but it worked well enough. The guy from the stove store next door helped me install it, and noticed I had a crack in my frame! I'm really glad he saw that, that's really no good. Neither of them wanted any money for 45 minutes of scavenger hunting, problem solving and struggling.
So I went down to the local open air welder. This is a person that's hard to start a conversation with because you walk up and they had a blinding arc welder working on some bed frame or something. I had to chime in and tell them their ground wire on my frame wasn't going to work because it was insulated by rubber from the rest of the frame (it wasn't that detailed of a story in Spanish). They welded for about a half hour, the two of them, then they wanted only $1.50! I talked them up to $3 because good christ, that's a bad hourly rate.
Next, I was biking around and noticed all the bicycle rickshaw drivers were hanging out around the same dilapidated block. There were about 7 ladies serving the same food I had at my second homestay, fry bread and outrageously thick syrupy red tea. The tea was on par, but the fry bread was pre-made and cold. Still, I didn't know where else to get this besides that one house on the mountain side. The rickshaw drivers were all sitting in their comfy passenger seats, enjoying life.
The wheelbarrow of food I chose was right in front of a huge green puddle in the street, and there was a waiter of sorts wearing shin high rubber boots, serving all the rickshaw drivers. I got some funny looks for eating with them.
After this I set out on my other mission for the day, to get a Ronaldinho soccer jersey. One of the top ten T-shirts I ever saw was this Ronaldinho jersey with a bunch of soccer action shots, worn by a gas station attendant near Cusco. Then in Puerto Maldonado there was another one with a picture of him kissing an old lady on the forehead. Really, who enjoys every second of his life more than that guy? He proposed to a Swedish soccer player at the Beijing Olympics in broken English the second time he met her. What a hero.
Anyways, I went to about 20 jersey stores, no exaggeration, and it was hard for me because I can't really pronounce Ronaldinho, and he's Brazilian so Peruvians don't give a damn. It'd be like asking for Ohio State jerseys in Milwaukee, there's a massive lake and another country in the way. Eventually, I found a place with one, but it's not nearly as cool as the other two I saw.
After that, I continued to get lost, and found and lost the bus district a few times while running other errands and randomly exploring, then couldn't find it again for a half hour when I wanted to leave.
A train went through Juliaca at one point, which is funny because the train tracks are fair game for the populous to set up their market, so they must have scrambled to pack up. Then it cuts off a major taxi street on the main shopping street, which really chills out that town like nothing else. It was nearly like going to the mall in America since we don't have taxis and microbuses passing through.
That's about it. For next time I have the bulk of Bolivia stories to tell, then this ride is over!
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
Ohhhh Señor Jesus!
I found a Quechua language radio station near Llave. Did some recording on my mp3 player for y'all.
And then I found a translator for a USA southern baptist minister in La Paz. This guy is amazing if he´s translating this live. Wish I had more space, this went on for an hour at least. You can learn some good Spanish from this.
The Rapture! En Español!
And then I found a translator for a USA southern baptist minister in La Paz. This guy is amazing if he´s translating this live. Wish I had more space, this went on for an hour at least. You can learn some good Spanish from this.
The Rapture! En Español!
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Puno and Lake Titicaca
The best thing to do in Puno is to visit the Uros, it´s truely unique to Peru...and Bolivia. The Uros live on a small colony of floating islands built out of reeds since before Incan times.
I really had higher hopes, I thought the islands were just loose to float wherever, and I thought I could save the $3 boat fare by swimming out to them, conquering them in my own Wisconsinite way. Titicaca is too cold for locals to swim in, but for hearty Midwesterners it´s slightly warmer than Memorial Day swimming in inland lakes.
In reality they´re well anchored in a wetland that would be nasty to swim in. It´s a long boat ride through a channel of reeds, probably 3-4kms.
In the present day, the idea of living on reed islands way out in a lake, serviced by dirt cheap ferries is poverty. They got some bad press for pressuring tourists for money for photographs, but I would have preferred that, I can´t add any more weight to my cycling rig. Now they just really pressure you to buy souviners and (Peruvian) ballpark priced drinks, so I got two keychains and a beer.
If you make the trip out, you get to meet the president of one of the colonies, and they show off what they build out there. The best of it are these massive reed boats, but in the current day there´s some cheating, or improvements. The boats are only reeds on the outside, inside they´re stuffed with recycled glass and plastic bottles which float better than the reeds. Some of them are double-decker, but of course reeds alone can´t support fat European tourists, so it´s a wooden loft wrapped in reeds to hide the wood.
The Uros even eat the reeds that make up their island, when they´re still green anyways. They let us try some, not too bad.
Walking on the islands is sort of like walking in a barn with hay bales for flooring. Cooking on the islands is a problem because you could burn the whole place down, so they have some specialized pottery to raise up their fire.
Besides that, not much else, they have a school and hospital out there. They´re real buildings just set on top of probably real islands.
Another thing in Puno that absolutely made my day was the discovery of a toilet store near my hostel. Do I even have to say the punchline? No seats in the whole store! I saw three stores in Puno, and one in Juliaca, no toilet seats in any of them! Departmento de Puno is a silly place. My hostal had 25 gallon buckets of water stored up for the water blackouts, just like I was used to since Macusani. And no agua caliente! I was going to suffer through a cold shower before leaving, but I just heard the sound of water flowing from the showerhead back to the source.
One thing that made me sad was seeing pale colored sheepsheads for sale outside the stadium. And then a few corners later street dogs and traditional women digging through a pile of trash and rotten food right on the street. Rough scenes to see before bedtime.
Dead sheep don´t have to be sad though. Down south of Puno by Juli I saw the standard Toyota combibuses with their roof racks loaded as full as possible with strapped down sheep bodies! I really couldn´t tell if they were alive or not, the ones up front had their heads up high, but they were probably just flopping in the wind. Sorry I don´t have a photo to share, I had about 7 chances too, there were that many dead or tranquilized sheep going up north towards Puno.
I also saw live sheep taking the bus! One of the buses that whipped by had the back seat down and four live sheep in there, then one traditional woman and the driver. Made my day. I wonder if they paid 60 cents each just like anyone else.
Those traditional women really have great control over their farm animals. In the best case I saw 20 sheep, four alpacas, a few donkeys and some pigs all marching in a happy formation across the altiplanto. And they keep them out of the street until its time to cross, it´s all perfectly correographed. I think all it takes is a whip, and then association of the whip with the sound, Sshh. Looks like they spend some time with each new animal in small groups. I witnessed them chasing just two pigs around one afternoon, training them.
South of Puno there was a strange immigration checkpoint. These guys from Peru´s SUNAT agency dressed all in black, and black cowboy hats were standing in a tiny town with road cones out. Salsa music was playing. It was all verbal, seems like they just wanted to ask me questions in Spanish until they stumped me. They were all the same truck driver questions I´m used to, until they asked if I had children. I guess they must have said hijos instead of niños. Anyways, they had to switch to broken english, then seconds later I was allowed to pass.
I had a pretty bad night in ILAVE, Peru. I thought it was LLAVE (key en español), until I saw it in all caps on a bus. I foolishly left Puno for La Paz with just 100 soles ($30) in my pocket, I hadn´t used an ATM since Puerto Maldonado because there just aren´t any. Juliaca and Puno have them, but I forgot. Anyways, so in Ilave I didn´t want to spend money on a hostal, so I started setting up my tent in this crater thing to keep out of the winds that can be miserable. It was right off the main road, not even out of town, and these people kept stopping by looking at me like I was building a space ship. I kept getting the standard, "Its too cold! Go to the hostal!" BS that I´m sick of.
The dysentary bug bit again in the privacy of 3am, thank Jehovah, so nasty! I totalled my pair of pants in the panicked rush. Post disaster, I was standing out in that crater with no idea what to do. It definitely wasn´t all that cold, I had a nice time looking at the stars for a few minutes ignoring the miserable state at my feet. It´s probably good I´m traveling alone, I returned to my tent for more supplies in nothing but shoes and a coat. I´m still searching for some poor lavanderia where I can bring my clothes in shame.
The town of Juli does not have a catamaran to Bolivia, no matter what may be claimed on the Internet. The harbor has a really fancy building that is all boarded up, and then some rowboats.
I ended up taking the bus part of the way to some strange border town. Like usual, they tried to sell me an entire bus at first for 50 soles, a private bus to the border. The price for traveling with the fine people of Peru is 2 soles, 60 cents.
The same thing happened in Maldonado, I thought I´d ask the car ferry people for advice on jungle boating, thinking they´d be impartial. They tried to talk me into renting their extremely slow car ferry for a river cruise, and for a lot of money.
The same thing happened again in Copacabana, in Bolivia. I forgot about the timezone change, so I missed my boat to the island of the sun, and they tried to sell me a private boat for 300 Bolivianos.
I couldn´t believe the border crossing, after how much it´s been talked up online, it was much easier than advertised. I did fail to get the Bolivian visa in Puno though, just because they were out of stickers to attach my passport photo to the form. Not sure I believe that.
So the border is this stone arch at the end of a long uphill road. They pretend there´s a wall, but really it only extends a few hundred feet. No matter, there are no guards or anything watching, I could have just cycled through. It´s very voluntary, you have to walk into the Bolivian immigration office yourself. Then you find out you need to get an exit stamp from Peru, so you walk back across.
The visa is reciprocal, which means it costs Americans $135 in crisp $20 bills, just like it costs Bolivians to apply to the US. They have USD change, wrinkled $1 bills.
Really all you need is the money, a passport, the exit stamp, and a copy of your passport front page and yellow fever vaccination. They didn´t care to see my fake fancy hotel reservation in La Paz, a bank account printout or passport photo.
On the application form, they checked off that I had arrived by train, a train that doesn´t exist in that part of Bolivia, and crossed off some other complicated stuff.
Across the border people were noticeable more chill, waves and holas were not as frequently returned as in Peru, and the road was lower quality.
Copacabana is such a cheap resort town, it blew me away. I could afford a vacation there with my first job, The Bargain Bulletin paper route from middle school. That route paid 5 cents per paper delivered, or $7.50 per week I think. A couple weeks of that saved up and I could afford the $6/night hostal with a view of Lake Titicaca and hot water(!), and 15 cents for an apple. Dinner would be a splurge at $2 for a hamburger or $4 for fajitas. A boat ride to the Island of the Sun and back is only $2.25.
I had a pretty good time on the Island of the Sun, despite it being a tourist trap. I made friends with a Japanese traveler on the boat with poor English and worse Spanish. We only had an hour to walk around, and I convinced him to hustle to the peak of the island´s mountain. The lake itself is already at 3800m (12,500ft) elevation, so it´s a chore. We got up there in 45 minutes, took a few quick pictures and then had to flat out run down these rocky paths back to the boat.
Down at the harbor, five minutes late, some assholes tried to tell us our boat already took off, and maybe if I stopped to listen they would have tried to sell me a private boat for 400 Bolivianos. I saw the recognizable gringo with the stupid yellow hat on a boat and ignored them, and we made it.
(Sailboat geekout, ignore the following)
Immediately after getting back to Copacabana I walked right up to the sailboats for hire people, with the sun nearly setting, and handed over 50 Bolivianos for an hour, no negotiation. It´s a small price to pay for sailing on a janky pinewood boat at 3800m. It was just like sailing with me and my janky 1970s hobie catamaran, except now with a language barrier and worse components. I guess sailing terms in English are pretty much a language barrier already though. There were panicked moments at the start, the sail went up, then had to come right down again to retie the sail to the boom. It was basically a rowboat style, with the oars included (essential), and then a mast with three shrouds just like the hobie cat.
The main sheet block (block means pulley in modern sailing, and main sheet means...well nevermind) was really a block of wood screwed down to the inside of the hull. I guess that explains some things. You could tie the mainsheet to it with a quick release knot, then you just had the rudder to hold on to.
The rudder tiller was really just a tree branch, minus the bark. The boom and mast were tree trunks, I assume. Sailing does not have to be a rich mans sport, if you have a lot of building time and some farming ropes.
These boats really make some distance. That guy, Marceille, told me some tourists once rented his boat for over a month, they sail toured it all the way to Peru across the lake. Also, you can hire this guy to bring you to the Island of the Sun and back, it takes 3 hours each way. There´s always wind! Every day the wind blows towards the island in the morning, and back home in the afternoon. Not sure all that can be true.
My trip is almost over, I fly out of Lima on November 6th. Only five more days of dumbassing, better make it good!
I really had higher hopes, I thought the islands were just loose to float wherever, and I thought I could save the $3 boat fare by swimming out to them, conquering them in my own Wisconsinite way. Titicaca is too cold for locals to swim in, but for hearty Midwesterners it´s slightly warmer than Memorial Day swimming in inland lakes.
In reality they´re well anchored in a wetland that would be nasty to swim in. It´s a long boat ride through a channel of reeds, probably 3-4kms.
In the present day, the idea of living on reed islands way out in a lake, serviced by dirt cheap ferries is poverty. They got some bad press for pressuring tourists for money for photographs, but I would have preferred that, I can´t add any more weight to my cycling rig. Now they just really pressure you to buy souviners and (Peruvian) ballpark priced drinks, so I got two keychains and a beer.
If you make the trip out, you get to meet the president of one of the colonies, and they show off what they build out there. The best of it are these massive reed boats, but in the current day there´s some cheating, or improvements. The boats are only reeds on the outside, inside they´re stuffed with recycled glass and plastic bottles which float better than the reeds. Some of them are double-decker, but of course reeds alone can´t support fat European tourists, so it´s a wooden loft wrapped in reeds to hide the wood.
The Uros even eat the reeds that make up their island, when they´re still green anyways. They let us try some, not too bad.
Walking on the islands is sort of like walking in a barn with hay bales for flooring. Cooking on the islands is a problem because you could burn the whole place down, so they have some specialized pottery to raise up their fire.
Besides that, not much else, they have a school and hospital out there. They´re real buildings just set on top of probably real islands.
Another thing in Puno that absolutely made my day was the discovery of a toilet store near my hostel. Do I even have to say the punchline? No seats in the whole store! I saw three stores in Puno, and one in Juliaca, no toilet seats in any of them! Departmento de Puno is a silly place. My hostal had 25 gallon buckets of water stored up for the water blackouts, just like I was used to since Macusani. And no agua caliente! I was going to suffer through a cold shower before leaving, but I just heard the sound of water flowing from the showerhead back to the source.
One thing that made me sad was seeing pale colored sheepsheads for sale outside the stadium. And then a few corners later street dogs and traditional women digging through a pile of trash and rotten food right on the street. Rough scenes to see before bedtime.
Dead sheep don´t have to be sad though. Down south of Puno by Juli I saw the standard Toyota combibuses with their roof racks loaded as full as possible with strapped down sheep bodies! I really couldn´t tell if they were alive or not, the ones up front had their heads up high, but they were probably just flopping in the wind. Sorry I don´t have a photo to share, I had about 7 chances too, there were that many dead or tranquilized sheep going up north towards Puno.
I also saw live sheep taking the bus! One of the buses that whipped by had the back seat down and four live sheep in there, then one traditional woman and the driver. Made my day. I wonder if they paid 60 cents each just like anyone else.
Those traditional women really have great control over their farm animals. In the best case I saw 20 sheep, four alpacas, a few donkeys and some pigs all marching in a happy formation across the altiplanto. And they keep them out of the street until its time to cross, it´s all perfectly correographed. I think all it takes is a whip, and then association of the whip with the sound, Sshh. Looks like they spend some time with each new animal in small groups. I witnessed them chasing just two pigs around one afternoon, training them.
South of Puno there was a strange immigration checkpoint. These guys from Peru´s SUNAT agency dressed all in black, and black cowboy hats were standing in a tiny town with road cones out. Salsa music was playing. It was all verbal, seems like they just wanted to ask me questions in Spanish until they stumped me. They were all the same truck driver questions I´m used to, until they asked if I had children. I guess they must have said hijos instead of niños. Anyways, they had to switch to broken english, then seconds later I was allowed to pass.
I had a pretty bad night in ILAVE, Peru. I thought it was LLAVE (key en español), until I saw it in all caps on a bus. I foolishly left Puno for La Paz with just 100 soles ($30) in my pocket, I hadn´t used an ATM since Puerto Maldonado because there just aren´t any. Juliaca and Puno have them, but I forgot. Anyways, so in Ilave I didn´t want to spend money on a hostal, so I started setting up my tent in this crater thing to keep out of the winds that can be miserable. It was right off the main road, not even out of town, and these people kept stopping by looking at me like I was building a space ship. I kept getting the standard, "Its too cold! Go to the hostal!" BS that I´m sick of.
The dysentary bug bit again in the privacy of 3am, thank Jehovah, so nasty! I totalled my pair of pants in the panicked rush. Post disaster, I was standing out in that crater with no idea what to do. It definitely wasn´t all that cold, I had a nice time looking at the stars for a few minutes ignoring the miserable state at my feet. It´s probably good I´m traveling alone, I returned to my tent for more supplies in nothing but shoes and a coat. I´m still searching for some poor lavanderia where I can bring my clothes in shame.
The town of Juli does not have a catamaran to Bolivia, no matter what may be claimed on the Internet. The harbor has a really fancy building that is all boarded up, and then some rowboats.
I ended up taking the bus part of the way to some strange border town. Like usual, they tried to sell me an entire bus at first for 50 soles, a private bus to the border. The price for traveling with the fine people of Peru is 2 soles, 60 cents.
The same thing happened in Maldonado, I thought I´d ask the car ferry people for advice on jungle boating, thinking they´d be impartial. They tried to talk me into renting their extremely slow car ferry for a river cruise, and for a lot of money.
The same thing happened again in Copacabana, in Bolivia. I forgot about the timezone change, so I missed my boat to the island of the sun, and they tried to sell me a private boat for 300 Bolivianos.
I couldn´t believe the border crossing, after how much it´s been talked up online, it was much easier than advertised. I did fail to get the Bolivian visa in Puno though, just because they were out of stickers to attach my passport photo to the form. Not sure I believe that.
So the border is this stone arch at the end of a long uphill road. They pretend there´s a wall, but really it only extends a few hundred feet. No matter, there are no guards or anything watching, I could have just cycled through. It´s very voluntary, you have to walk into the Bolivian immigration office yourself. Then you find out you need to get an exit stamp from Peru, so you walk back across.
The visa is reciprocal, which means it costs Americans $135 in crisp $20 bills, just like it costs Bolivians to apply to the US. They have USD change, wrinkled $1 bills.
Really all you need is the money, a passport, the exit stamp, and a copy of your passport front page and yellow fever vaccination. They didn´t care to see my fake fancy hotel reservation in La Paz, a bank account printout or passport photo.
On the application form, they checked off that I had arrived by train, a train that doesn´t exist in that part of Bolivia, and crossed off some other complicated stuff.
Across the border people were noticeable more chill, waves and holas were not as frequently returned as in Peru, and the road was lower quality.
Copacabana is such a cheap resort town, it blew me away. I could afford a vacation there with my first job, The Bargain Bulletin paper route from middle school. That route paid 5 cents per paper delivered, or $7.50 per week I think. A couple weeks of that saved up and I could afford the $6/night hostal with a view of Lake Titicaca and hot water(!), and 15 cents for an apple. Dinner would be a splurge at $2 for a hamburger or $4 for fajitas. A boat ride to the Island of the Sun and back is only $2.25.
I had a pretty good time on the Island of the Sun, despite it being a tourist trap. I made friends with a Japanese traveler on the boat with poor English and worse Spanish. We only had an hour to walk around, and I convinced him to hustle to the peak of the island´s mountain. The lake itself is already at 3800m (12,500ft) elevation, so it´s a chore. We got up there in 45 minutes, took a few quick pictures and then had to flat out run down these rocky paths back to the boat.
Down at the harbor, five minutes late, some assholes tried to tell us our boat already took off, and maybe if I stopped to listen they would have tried to sell me a private boat for 400 Bolivianos. I saw the recognizable gringo with the stupid yellow hat on a boat and ignored them, and we made it.
(Sailboat geekout, ignore the following)
Immediately after getting back to Copacabana I walked right up to the sailboats for hire people, with the sun nearly setting, and handed over 50 Bolivianos for an hour, no negotiation. It´s a small price to pay for sailing on a janky pinewood boat at 3800m. It was just like sailing with me and my janky 1970s hobie catamaran, except now with a language barrier and worse components. I guess sailing terms in English are pretty much a language barrier already though. There were panicked moments at the start, the sail went up, then had to come right down again to retie the sail to the boom. It was basically a rowboat style, with the oars included (essential), and then a mast with three shrouds just like the hobie cat.
The main sheet block (block means pulley in modern sailing, and main sheet means...well nevermind) was really a block of wood screwed down to the inside of the hull. I guess that explains some things. You could tie the mainsheet to it with a quick release knot, then you just had the rudder to hold on to.
The rudder tiller was really just a tree branch, minus the bark. The boom and mast were tree trunks, I assume. Sailing does not have to be a rich mans sport, if you have a lot of building time and some farming ropes.
These boats really make some distance. That guy, Marceille, told me some tourists once rented his boat for over a month, they sail toured it all the way to Peru across the lake. Also, you can hire this guy to bring you to the Island of the Sun and back, it takes 3 hours each way. There´s always wind! Every day the wind blows towards the island in the morning, and back home in the afternoon. Not sure all that can be true.
My trip is almost over, I fly out of Lima on November 6th. Only five more days of dumbassing, better make it good!
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