On the morning of the last day in Cusco, I boarded a pre-booked bus. Along the way, it made a couple of stops, including one at the highest point of the route, at an altitude of over 5,000 meters. The stop was short, so the symptoms of altitude sickness didn’t have time to manifest. By the end of the day full of mountains vistas, we arrived in Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the last Peruvian town on my route, a nondescript one, but an important tourist hub. (If you’re not planning to visit the Arequipa, the best starting point for visiting the famous Colca Canyon, one of the deepest canyons on the planet, you can reach it from Puno (160 km). The journey by two buses will take a whole day, but a taxi will reduce the time to six hours with less than dramatic increase of the cost. Unfortunately, the canyon didn’t fit into my itinerary.)
I was absolutely certain that here, as in all other cases, I had booked the transfer, so I didn’t even bother to check. After waiting quite a while at the bus station, I realized I was on my own. And I did not remember the hotel’s name (why I couldn’t check at my notes, I can’t recall now). What am I to do? And then, as it always happens to me in similar situations, without fail, thank goodness, a good angel appeared. My wife believes it’s because God loves me, but I’m more self-critical and say that fools are lucky.
So, I saw a girl locking a tourist office. “My person!” I exclaimed to myself and, having explained the situation, asked her for help. “Take a taxi,” she said. We stopped by the tourist information bureau, where she managed, by my last name, to detect the hotel I was booked at. I took her home and went to the hotel. In Puno, there’s a fixed price for all taxi rides within the city limits, but our driver, considering the stop at the tourist office as the end of the trip, demanded double payment. We settled on one and a half the regular fare.
I really wanted to visit the floating reed islands of the Uros people on the lake near Puno, but I thought this would require an extra day which I could not afford. But then my savior told me that it was possible to do this without losing a day: the town has a tour for such cases, starting early in the morning so that people could return to your hotels by the beginning of the day. “Let’s do it!” I exclaimed. “Unfortunately, it’s too late to book now. All the tourist offices are closed.” It was terribly disappointing that my good luck didn’t work this time. The situation wasn’t critical enough.
Early in the morning, a bus took me across the border to the Bolivian town of Copacabana with the basilica of Our Lady of Copacabana, the patron saint of Bolivia, standing on the shore. You can read an interesting story about this temple and how the famous beach in Rio de Janeiro got its name here.
The temple is popular not only in Bolivia but also in neighboring countries, from where believers come to the Copacabana for holidays. The saint is also considered the patron saint of motorists, so you can see hundreds of cars around her temple, brought here by their owners, sometimes from far away and even from other countries, to be blessed in the church. Live and artificial flowers, balloons, confetti, and other things are sold all around the temple to decorate the cars on their special day. I would say, it’s a rather strange sight.
And now I’m on a catamaran that will carry me across the waters of Lake Titicaca. Another highlight of the trip. Besides me, there are only two other passengers, a young couple. “We would have made the trip even if you were alone. The schedule must be kept,” the captain explained to me. Looking at the map now, I understood that I had crossed only a very small part of the huge lake. And I thought I had crossed the entire lake! Only now did I realize that this would have taken several days.
We sailed for several hours, with lunch on board, as the tour included a landing on the Isla del Sol, the holiest place for the Inca, where their empire was born. We climbed a steep path to an Indian sitting at the top, who conducted some kind of ceremony with us, gave us a braided cord, and received payment for his work. Then there was a swim in traditional Indian boats. The boat arrived at the port of Chua, from where it took two hours for another bus to make 68 km to La Paz, the administrative capital of Bolivia (according to the constitution, the capital is the city of Sucre, where the Supreme Court sits). Bolivia is the only country on the continent with a predominantly indigenous population.
The city, whose full official name is Nuestra Señora de La Paz, Our Lady of Peace, is located in the canyon of the Choqueyapu river, in a place where it forms a circus (a dead end in the canyon). The city’s houses, starting on the plain, reach the mountain and climb almost vertically nearly to the very top. The altitude is 3650 meters above sea level. I had no altitude sickness here. The city has a developed system of cable cars (Mi Teleférico) with 10 lines and almost 40 stations. Using the Teleférico, you also get a view of the city from above.
But I’ve explored the city by foot walking all day long. Starting from my hotel in the morning, I made the way to the center along a typical Indian street Sagarnaga with shops and souvenir stands (where I bought all my souvenirs on the way back), reaching the square Plaza Mayor de San Francisco with the basilica of the same name. There was an Indian market in the square, and the crowds of people made it difficult to see and photograph the austere basilica.
From the Plaza Mayor de San Francisco square, I proceeded to the old town (Casco Viejo), enclosed by the streets Socabaya, Ayacucho, Ingavi, and Ballivan. Within this area one finds also the main square of the city, Plaza Murillo (named not after the artist, but after the independence fighter hanged there), with the La Paz Cathedral, the Presidential Palace, and the country’s parliament. The latter is called Asamblea Legislativa Plurinacional, the Plurinational Legislative Assembly; the word “Plurinational” is also a part of the official name of the country, Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, the Plurinational State of Bolivia).
After wandering around there, I went to the Moon Valley, Valle de la Luna, ten kilometers from the city, a fantastic jumble of colorful peaks. You can get there boarding a collectivo (minibus) destination Mallasa at the paradero (bus stop) near the Lanza market on the Plaza Mayor de San Francisco square, but since I had already left that area, I decided to walk to the Tiahuanaco Square near the Hernando Siles stadium and take a collectivo from there. Another reason for this were ancient idols unearthed in Tiahuanaco, a pre-Inca settlement near Lake Titicaca, which were exhibited on the square. The idols were interesting, but before reaching them I had experienced an unpleasant adventure which could have ended quite sadly if not for luck.
As soon as I set off, a girl approached me and asked me something in Spanish. I did not understand, and she walked on. A few minutes later, a car stopped near me, and a man got out. He showed me some papers saying he was a police officer, and told me there were a lot of drugs circulating in the city and that he had to take me to the station for checking. Deeply rooted Soviet obedience to authority, despite almost fifty years of living elsewhere, made me obey, and I got into the car. Asking for my wallet, the man demonstratively sniffed it, then opened and asked in surprise: “Is that all you have? Where is your credit card? And your passport?”
Fortunately, the day before on the catamaran, the captain told me that I didn’t need to have my passport on me in La Paz, so, against my usual habit, I left everything in the hotel’s safe box, except for some small change for one day. Then the girl who had spoken to me before was also invited into the car, and she seemed to be checked as well. After that, the car stopped, and I was gestured to go. So I moved on, happily noticing that they had given me a ride almost all the way to my destination.
The Moon Valley lived up to all expectations, and I explored everything I could there. Returning to the stadium, I went to the nearby Parque Urbano Central. The park is located on a hill, and the gangways built there provide good views of the downtown, my next goal, from where, starting from Isabela Católica Square, I made a long return trip to the hotel. I walked about 15 kilometers that day, if not more.
While working on these notes, I found out that there’s another valley, 18 kilometers from the city, called the Valley of Souls (El Valle de las Ánimas). Covering an area of 2500 hectares, it has incredible fence-like rock formations and offers several hiking trails. The bus running from Umsa to Apaña goes there every 10 minutes.
It’s worth mentioning that La Paz has many markets, including the Witches’ Market (Mercado de las Brujas, Melchor Jimenez 872) where local healers (yatiris) sell various potions, herbs, amulets, talismans (including dried frogs) and other attributes related to folk beliefs. Here you can buy, for example, a lizard cream for back pain, a love potion, a llama fetus to be placed in the foundation of a new house, and much more.
Unfortunately, all my photos from this part of the trip did not survive, and I had to find replacements. All the photos here are either in the public domain or had a request to credit the author, which was done.
