Lago Titicaca

Arrived today in Copacabana, which is the town on lake Titicaca that you use to access isla del sol. Lake Titicaca, for those of you who were too busy doing drugs in High School to remember Geography, is the highest lake in the world at an elevation of about 12, 500 ft and is right on the border of Bolivia and Peru. Everyone goes to Isla del Sol usually for a day to see the place where the Incans believe the sun was born. We decided to stay for 2 days. Lake Titicaca itself, although pretty, is nothing special. It's just a lake. Hiking thru Isla del Sol is something else entirely. By far some of the prettiest views I've seen in S.A. We took a boat from the south end and then hiked from the northern end back towards where we were staying in the south end. The hike itself was pretty intense, I thought I was going to pass out for about half of it because you're walking in pure sun at an elevation of about 13,000 ft once you really get into the center of the island. However, we saw the ruins and the "sacred rock" where the sun was born and the views were out of a book. You should look at the pictures.

Isla del Sol is, surprisingly, pretty undeveloped as well which is refreshing. Of course, there are some places to stay on the island but there is no internet, no ATMS, little electricity and most "restaurants" are just a room added on to a family's house where they cook for you. No night clubs, no heating either. This fact has prompted me to start a business on the island so that I can begin the natural westernization process of ruining everything indigenous and making it packaged and commercial. I'll rent donkeys to lazy tourists who would rather ride the island on a pack animal than walking and the ride will end at the Sacred Rock which will have a bar with drinks and souvenirs. 15 bucks for everything. However, I'll need some seed money to get this started, so anybody interested please send cash to torreblanco@gmail.com using paypal. I promise a return on your investment within 10 years.

The Death Road

Came to La Paz and have been mainly bumming around with the Germans and Dessie, a friend we met in Oruro. It's pretty nice here, although so cold that I have to wear gloves at night. The elevation is about 3640 m (11942 ft) and so it gets pretty dicey sometimes.

I'll be honest and say that most of my time spent here hasn't been very..er..culturally centered. We've been mainly in the hostel bar known as Wild Rover which is owned and operated by a bunch of crazy irish people and then going to the after hours club known as "Ruta 36." It's a secret club that changes locations every two weeks. For fear of the differing types of people in my life who are reading this and may judge me, I won't go into details about what goes on there, but it's pretty nuts. Ask me later.

Realizing we needed to do something productive, we decided to shift gears. There's a road known as El Camino de la Muerte (The Death Road) which used to be used by passenger buses to go between La Paz and Coroico. Once the estimate came thru that about 300 people died each year because of buses just careening over the edge in a fiery wreckage, the Bolivian government finally got the message and built another road that I've heard is much better. The road still exists and is sometimes still used by cars and small trucks but is mainly now a tourist attraction done with mountain bikes, which is what we did.

You basically start at an elevation of 4000 meters on the new road, which was freezing cold with hail, and quickly bike your way down to the Death Road itself which is lower, warmer and quite beautiful actually. That's when you realize why they call it the death road; because the "road" is gravel, about 12 feet across at its greatest width and has basically no guard rails with some plunges of about 200 feet. There are crosses everywhere placed at locations where people fell and died and sometimes even the wreckage of a crashed van at the bottom. Oh yeah, and the the bikes you have contain only two working gears and crap brakes. I realized this after I was already traveling at about 35-40 on the bike (it's a steep decline the whole way) After taking a tight turn too fast, I flipped completely over my bike, hit the ground, opened my eyes and was looking over the edge of a cliff that dropped about 75 feet. It might not have killed me...but it definitely would have crippled me for life.  I'm pretty sure that I cracked a rib because it hurts when I breathe. Que Triste. Anyway, me, dessy, nico, gregor and rafael leave for Lake Titicaca soon. It's hard to breathe even here, lake titicaca is at 3800 meters, I wonder what will happen....

Carneval and Espuma Burns....

Some German friends that I met on the farm in Argentina arrived in Sucre and we decided to go to Carneval in Oruro, Bolivia. Every country in South America has their own weirdo version of Carneval and this week's was Bolivia's. I decided to leave Sucre after only three weeks of classes since I'd heard that Oruro is THE Carneval for Bolivia and couldn't be missed. Most people go there, even the president and its known to be insane. It completely lived up to its reputation.

A group of us had to book a tour to go there since EVERY bed in the city was booked and this was the only option to have a place to sleep. After about 10 hours we got to Oruru and found our hostel: an abandoned night club with mattresses on the ground. Upon seeing this I knew that I had arrived in the right place. It seems that the city was filled with atleast 50,000 people. Saturday we went to our cramped seats on the parade route. It was madness. Thousands of people stuffed into small wooden benches and spraying "espuma" everywhere. It's essentially just shaving cream that they sell on every corner on every street during Carneval and its sprayed by everyone ONTO everyone 24/7...especially onto huge gringos. It's apparently toxic too...because 2 days after, the skin on my face (the main areas where I was espumaed) began to literally fall off leper style. I hope I never see that stuff again. I'm still picking off pieces of my eyelid.

The nights were filled with walking the streets talking to drunk Bolivians, being bombarded with espuma and generally making asses of ourselves dancing in the parade which I'm pretty sure we weren't supposed to do. If I thought I couldn't speak Spanish before it was here that I REALLY knew I couldn't speak it. It seemed that every 3 minutes we were stopped by a random Bolivian wanting our life story and offering us this drink that looked like milk mixed with gasoline and tasted about the same. The three days and two nights that we were there the city never slept. Nico, Desi and I walked until sunrise and the streets were filled with people. It was fun talking to people and pretending we were from other countries. After so many people ask you where you're from, lying is just more fun. Carneval was one of the craziest things I've ever seen in my life, almost crazier than the Southside irish parade. Look at the pictures, there were some pretty great costumes and alot of super hot bolivian girls dressed like Indians. What more could you need out of a party?

After realizing that another day in Oruro would kill us, we took a bus to La Paz to recover. It's freezing here.