Lake Titicaca and La Paz

Hey gang....this update comes to you from the highest capital city in the World -La Paz in Bolivia! But in between the jungle and La Paz, we headed by bus to Lake Titicaca the highest navigable lake in the world. More desperately dry country, mud bricks, poverty, ladies in bowler hats, crap roads and buses buses buses...oh and llamas of course. We toured the lake and stayed on an island with a local family. The lake is beautiful, but we had a boat the size of the titanic powered by a vee dub engine so although it looked like we could throw stones to the island we were headed out to stay on, it took 3 hours to get there! Leather lounges on the boat though...bizarre country this. The highlight of this little leg of the journey was undoubtedly the 33 reed islands that people live on out in the lake. They are about 2 metres deep and just float around! The best thing is that if people on the islands get annoyed with each other they just chop there bit of the island off and float away to another or start there own! Nice conflict resolution process that is....the island we visited had done just that the week before. Headed into Bolivia after this by bus and the border guards wouldn´t let our guide through for some reason so that got a bit hair raising. Visited Copacabana (the original, not the one in Brazil with the nice beach and the song) - glad we only stayed 1 hour. The wek before you couldnt even get into copacabana as the roads were blockaded with boulders because of some transport dispute. Then into La Paz, where we are recuperating from the pace of the tour which should have been 20% slower to be really relaxing, but back on our feet today and well and truly looking forward to the next leg. La Paz is in a sloping valley and we are both looking forward to Buenos Aires which is supposed to be very european...

One bizarre thing about La Paz - the shoe shine boys all wear balaclavas to hide their identity - they look scary as all hell!

bye for now...

Love paul and sal.