la paz (again)

Claudia and i had a really long bus trip from cusco, peru to la paz, bolivia. there is a direct route between the two cities, and then there is a more round about way that involves a stop off in copacaban, bolivia. the bus company totally lied to us and said we had a direct route. the trip was supposed to take 12 hours, but ended up being 16 hours. at one point the bus stopped and there were a bunch of indigenous villagers selling weavings and trinkets to the tourists. these kids were there with a baby alpaca and it's mama. i gave them 60 cents for claudia and i to pet the alpacas. the kids said the baby was only two weeks old and still nursing. the mama alpaca kept coming over and kissing the baby. we hung out and talked to the kids for a little bit. their family has three alpacas, and now four with the baby.

after copacabana, all but maybe 6 other passengers got off the bus. the sun set, and it got really cold. this photo is one i took while biking through this region, but during the bus ride we couldn't see anything because it was pitch black. check out the snow on top of the mountain range in the background. it was freezing cold, and claudia and i hudled together underneath scarfs and plastic rain ponchos to stay warm. at one point the road stopped, and we had to take a barge across lake titicaca. i had done this previously on my bike, but during daylight hours. apparently it is illegal to cross the lake at night, so the buss driver told us to pull the curtains shut, and walked around with a flashlight collecting one boliviano per person as a crossing fee. the barges are just planks of wood held together, and the whole thing rocked rather alarmingly as we crossed the lake. finally we made it to la paz around 11:00 at night. we both were freezing cold with numb feet, and claudia didn't feel very good.
in the morning claudia woke up and was sick, so i figure i'll just hang out here in la paz until she feels better cuz it sucks to be sick and alone in a strange city. i'm really anxious to get back on my bike though.this is a picture of the wall inside the shower at our hostel. those wires go directly to the shower head, and then there is a switch to flip on when you want hot water. if you look closely, you can see that underneath the plaster, the walls are still made of mud and grass just like in the countryside.

it feels funny to be back in la paz. i've been traveling for so long now, that to return somewhere that i've already been makes me feel like i'm back in familiar settings even though la paz is wildly different from any american city. anything you could ever want to buy is probaby sold on the street. there are women with stalls selling electronics, toilet paper, flower arangements, locks and tools, clothing, sunglasses, snacks, weird looking drinks with strange wrinkled fruit in the bottom. sometimes it will just be one woman sitting on the ground with a bag of limes or some empanadas. yesterday i bought a shaving razor from this indigenous woman seated on the sidewalk with a display of various brands of razors layed out on a piece of cloth.
the city is clogged with traffic. very few people own cars, but buses and taxis honk their way through the maddness chocking the street with smog and noise. small toyota vans called "omnibuses" are everywhere. there is a driver, and then also i guy yelling out the van's destination and price. sometimes i think it must be a family affair because i've seen kids as young as ten yelling out of the van's open door. it's all pretty crazy, but at the same time it almost feels normal to be because out of all the places i've been on this trip, i've spent the most time in la paz. anyhows... hope everyone is doing good. love,
-jessie

Machu Picchu

I think Machu Picchu is probably one of the most amazing things i have ever seen. just the mountains themselves surrounding the city are amazing, and then to have this beautiful, mysterious, inca city situated in the middle of clouds and jagged mountain tops is really incredible. not much is know about machu picchu. it was probably constructed in the 1400s. archeologists say that it is not a typical inca city, and that most likely it was a vacation spot for inca nobility. they estimate that around 500 to 1000 people lived there at any one time. inca stonework is really impressive. the stone blocks fit together so tightly that you can't fit a knife blade between them. the incas didn't use the wheel, so all of these giant pieces of stone were hauled up the mountain side and then chisled into place. at the base and doorways of the buildings the incas put really big stones, but then up near the top it seemed like they just stuck a bunch of smaller rocks together with some kind of morter. i seriously cannot imagine the number of people it must have taken to move the larger stones into place. after walking around machu picchu for a little bit we went on a 40 minute hike up this mountain peak called huayna picchu. the incas built terraces and a moon temple at the top. it was a pretty steep hike, and when we got to the top, we climbed up to the tallest rock and just enjoyed the view for a little bit. it was so great to be up there with all my friends. there are a lot of llamas that graze on the grass in machu picchu and for some reason they love having their photos taken. i've never seen anything like this before, but as soon as i got out my camera, these llamas came right up to me. i think they must have liked all the attention. here are some really cute llama photos. i just like can't get over how cute the llamas and alpacas are. after lunch we went on a hike through the jungle. at one point there were llamas blocking the path and we had to push them on their butts to get them to move out of the way. the jungle surrounding machu picchu is really amazing. i saw a bunch of different kinds of orchids, some crazy moss and lichen, neon blue metalic beatles, and giant irridescent blue morpho butterflies. the next day we went ot Ollantaytambo, which is an indigenous village with some inca ruins. many of the houses in the village are built on old inca foundation, and the whole town is layed out in an inca grid system, which is supposed to be shaped like a corn cob. ollantaytambo has some cool ruins and we spent most of the day hiking around and climbing on ruins. it was really fun. tomorrow tameem and john fly back to the US, but alice and claudia and i are going to go to bolivia together. hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

Cusco

my friends from california are visiting right now, and it's been super fun. i've just been spending money and hanging out. this is a photo of claudia and i in an "expensive" japanese restaurant in the miraflores neighborhood of lima. it's fun to eat in classy restaruants in latin america because by american standards, they are not that expensive.

alice's brother jon found this great hostel in the historic district of lima. there were pet tortoises and they just wandered around the hotel all day. at one point i went into our room, and there was a tortoise hanging out under the bed. we only spent one day in lima, and went to the san francisco church and saw the catacombs. unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos. but they were pretty crazy looking, just piles of dried up bones and skulls scattered below the church.

on sunday we flew from lima to cusco, the jumping off point to machu picchu. originally, cusco was the headquarters for the inca empire. the city was built in the shape of a puma, and contained many religious and ceremonial site. after the spanish conquest, the majority of the inca structures, were converted to spanish churches. this is the santo domingo church, but if you look at the foundation, you can see that it is built on top of an inca temple.
at first glance cusco looks like a spanish colonial city, but then everywhere you look are remnants of incan architecture. the huge stones of this wall are inca, but then on top is a spanish colonial contruction. i kind of wish you could erase all the spanish buildings to see what cusco looked like originally.
tomorrow we are going to take the train to machu picchu. it's been so great seeing my friends from home, and i can't wait to check out machu picchu. hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

La Paz

I’ve been hanging out in La Paz, Bolivia for like 5 days now I think. It’s been really nice. Biking into town was a little stressful. I asked a few people, which way to go, and they all pointed towards a fairly busy freeway. As I flew downhill I noticed several “no biking” signs, but no police stopped me, and eventually I made it into the city. It’s funny, because there is no way I would ever bike along a freeway like that in the US, but when bike touring, you don’t really have much of a choice.
It also is a little disorienting to enter into such a large city after spending so much time in the middle of nowhere. the two "hotels" i stayed in before la paz had no running water. I decided to stay at this hostel called the Adventure Brew Hostel. It’s a giant backpacker hostel, where they have a micro brewery on the fourth floor, and you get a complementary beer every night in the hostel bar and an all you can eat pancake breakfast in the morning.
My fist night there, I was talking to this British guy john, and we went up to the bar to meet up with a friend of his. It ended up that his friend was this American girl named Ingrid, who is the daughter of a friend of a friend of my parents. confusing, no? My parent’s friend Cathy had sent us both emails to see if we could meet up, but I was in Peru (I think) and she was in Ecuador so we never met. What are the odds of us both ending up at the same hostel in Bolivia?

While out to dinner with british john and ingrid, i ran into the irish couple, John and Po, who i'd hung out with at lake titicaca. the next day british john, and irish john and po and i all went to this british pub to watch the irish - french rugby match at 11:00am. we ordered a "proper british fry up" for breakfast, which included deep fried toast, baked beens, stewed tomatoes, fried eggs, and bacon. and then since it was a rugby match we all got beer as well.
The rugby match was insane. i've never seen ruby before, and it is a brutal, brutal sport. english john assured me that rugby was a "gentleman's sport" despite the violence. everyone in the pub was either irish or british, and peole were just going crazy for the game. whenever the irish would score, the whole bar would errupt in applause, with people yelling, "yeah! that's right mates!" it was pretty awesome. po said that this was about a quarter of the volume of an irish pub during a rugby match.
this is a picture of a box of alpaca fetuses. La Paz has a witch doctor market. it's pretty creepy. i'm not sure what the witch doctors do with the alpaca fetuses, but maybe it's best not to know. there are stalls full of herbs, and trinkets and fake US dollar bills. i've seen alters with these things on them, but never before the alpaca fetuses.

Yesterday Po, john and i rode mountain bikes down the "most dangerous rode." the tour company took all these photos of us and burned me a cd, but i can't get the cd player to open on this computer. so, if you want to see what it looks like check out this site http://www.hotelscostarica.net/Stremnaya/carretera-mas-peligrosa/. the rode is safer now because they built a new one that is paved. the only people who use the most dangerous rode are tourists on mountain biking expeditions. it was a really beatiful ride. you start off high above la paz in the altiplano, and then plummet down this dirt and gravel rode into the amazon basin. it was freezing cold in the morning, and boiling hot in the afternoon.
tomorrow i am traveling back to peru via bus and airplane to meet up with my friends for a 10 day vacation from my cycling trip. we are going to cuzco and machu pechu, and then i'm not sure what else. hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

juli

my trip around lake titicaca was so, so fun. lake titicaca is a mangled spanish version of the the quechua name for the lake, which is "titijala". "titi" means puma, and "jala" means rock. it's funny that the spanish call it titicaca because caca means poo in spanish.

the first stop on the tour was the floating islands of uros. some people call them the floating tourist traps, but i still thought they were really cool. there are about 30 of these islands, and they are all man made, constructed entirely from the totoro reed. the indigenous communities that live there just keep layering down more reeds every couple of weeks. we all wandered around the islands and then got to ride in a totoro reed boat over to the main island. i think if i had to live on one of these islands, i'd probably go insane from boredom, but it was a fun place to visit.

next we had a three hour boat ride over to amantani island. i had so much fun on the boat ride. i don't get to hang out and speak english that much, and a bunch of us sat on the roof of the boat and just hung out an talked for the whole trip. there was a really cool couple from ireland, an american women, a guy from chile, a couple from argentina, two serbs, two italians, and a girl from japan.
amantani island
has about 4,000 families divided into 8 communities. the primary language is quechua, but many people also speak spanish as a second language. there were a lot of wheat, quinuoa, and corn fields on the island seperated by stone walls. footpaths meandered between the fields and houses scattered around the island, and all the women still wore their traditional clothing.
part of our tour involved a homestay with a local family. my family was so nice. the kids were super friendly and kept hugging me and holding my hands. it was really great. their house was made from adobe bricks with a corregated steel roof. in their garden they were growing corn, beans, and quinuoa, and for lunch, my host mom made quinuoa soup from the garden. it was delicious.
right now around lago titicaca, there is a huge festival going on called candelaria. our host families took us to the main plaza on amantani to participate in the festivities. hands down, this was the craziest party i have ever been to. my pictures really don't do the scene justice. so, this was a pretty little plaza, and there were 8 bands playing at the same time. sometimes the bands were only 10 feet apart, so that if you stood between them all you heard was noise. all the young people of amantani were dressed up in these wild outfits and doing some type of coordinated dancing to the music, such that each band had its own wild group of drunken teenagers dancing in front of it.
because it was so hot, when people poured beer into cups, they got a lot of foam. the young people would chug down these little cups of beer and then fling the foam on the ground before they continued to dance. you might be able to tell from this photo that there are two bands playing right ontop of each other. in the forground is a band all in blue, and then in the background, right next to them in another band all in white. the island was without electricity, so everything came to a stop around 7:30 when the sun went down. my host mom gave me a candle when we were back at the house.
the next day we went to visit taquile island. the men on taquile do a ton of knitting, and the knitted hats they wear donote their rank and marital status. a hat with a white tip meant that a man was single, a long colored hat meant he was married, and a short knit hat, with a felt hat ontop signified that a man was a community leader. the men carried special purses for coca leaves, and when they wanted to great someone, they gave them a handful of coca leaves. sort of like saying hello. we ate lunch there and then headed back to puno.

today i did a short day (50 miles)to the town of juli. this guy Blander ran into me near puno and rode the whole way to juli with me, then turned around and rode back to puno. so he will have ridden 100 miles today. crazy, huh? he's 19 years old and is training to be in the army cuz he likes shooting guns. it's funny cuz when you pay to do these tourist tours, it's a little awkward because you feel like a lot of your interacations with the local people are them trying to sell you stuff. but when you bike tour people just like hanging out with you.
so... i've decided that i want to slow down and do more tourist stuff and not worry about getting to tierra del fuego before winter. it was a real bumber in ecuador cuz there was a lot of fun stuff to do, but i didn't have time. i think now i'm just going to bike from tourist attraction to tourist attraction. should be more fun, and i'll get to see more than just the highway. i'm still going to be traveling south though. ok, hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

Puno

I am currently staying in a really nice hotel in Puno on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca. i've had a rough couple of days cycling through the andes, and the hot water in the shower felt so, so good. it is so crazy how rapidly the scenery can change. it only took about 20 miles of cycling out of arequipa before the desert started to give way to pampas grass. in the distance i could see the snow covered peaks of Chanchani, Misti, and Pichupuchu volcanoes. i entered a national reserve called Salinas y Aguada Blanca. along the road were signs that said, "drive carefully vicuñas crossing" Vicuñas are a type of camelid related to alpacas. they are an endangered species, and have thus far resisted domestication. i was so excited that i was cycling through an area with vicuñas that even though i was going down hill with an insane tailwind, i had the brakes on so i could look everywhere to see if there were any vicuñas wandering around. finally i saw some, dropped my bike along the side of the road, and started walking out into the pampas to try and get a good photo. i thought they would be really skitish like deer, but they let me get this close before they all started running away. man they are so awesome looking!
the indigenous people living in these parts raise alpacas. during the day they are let out to graze in the pampas, and at night they are hurded into stone walled inclosers. in Arequipa you could order alpaca steaks in the restaurants, but alpacas are mostly raised for their wool. baby alpaca wool is really soft like cashmere. i think alpacas are so awesome. anytime i saw an alpaca farm, i totally stopped riding to take pictures. most of them didn't turn out that great cuz they keep moving around, but you can see this guy's face pretty good. they are pretty cute, huh?

Between Arequipa and Lake Titicaca there is not much in the way of civilization. i ended up camping in a dry river bed the first night, and then sleeping in an indigenous family's house the second night. when i was camping, i woke up at around 2:00am and thought, "god it's cold." then passed out again. in the morning everything was covered in a layer of thick frost, and there was ice in my water bottles. rolling up a frozen tent with your bare hands is totally horrible.
i think i was camping at around 12,00 feet, and then started climbing. i was feeling alright considering the cold, but then my head started to hurt. by 11:00am i figured i was suffering from altitude sickness. my head was pounding and i was totally dizzy and nausious. i kept feeling like i wanted to fall over and pass out. finally i reached this little town with a restaurant. i ordered a bowl of soup, and was talking to the family who ran the place about not feeling very good. they suggested i drink some coca leaf tea. i'd heard before that chewing coca leaves can help with altitude sickness so i figured i'd give it a try. i don't think it did anything though. my altitude sickness didn't go away, and i didn't even get a buzz like you do from coffee.
after lunch my headache got a lot worse. anytime i had to climb uphill i kind of wanted to cry. at some point i got to this town called Crucero Alto, and there was a sign that said the elevation was 4,528 meters, which is about 13,500 feet. all the houses were made of stone with thatch roofs. i was feeling so messed up i almost asked one of the families if i could put my tent up next to their house and pass out for a while. but then i figured i might feel better if i kept cycling down to a lower elevation.

i ended up cycling down to this lake, and spent the night in this village called Santa Lucía. there were no hotels there, and this family who had a restaurant told me i could sleep in their spare room. they made me dinner, and then asked me if i wanted some coca leaf tea. i said sure, figuring it might make me feel a little better. i don't think it did anything, and it certainly didn't keep me up because i passed out immediatly after dinner. this morning when i woke up, my headach was gone, so that's good.
tomorrow i am going on a two day excursion to visit the floating islands of uros, isla taquile, and isla amantani. both tauquile and imantani have ruins on them so it should be a cool trip. hope everyone is good! love,
-jessie,