Lake Titicaca, part 1: Bolivia

   From Sucre we took an overnight bus to La Paz, the other capital of Bolivia.  One of our guidebooks invited us to take in the café culture of the city.  However, with a million people and almost as many motorised vehicles packed into a small steep-sided valley the effect was claustrophobic, heightened by the shortness of breath from the altitude and pollution.  We only stayed long enough to have a curry at the genuine London curry house, complete with eye-watering vindaloo and a young American chap foolish enough to order it.  The next day we hopped on the first tourist bus we saw going to Copacabana, three hours away on Lake Titicaca.

   Kizzy was upset at the very concept of Lake Titicaca.  The locals proudly boasted it to be the world’s largest high-altitude lake.  “It’s not the highest and it’s not the largest”, she noted disdainfully, “so what’s so special about it?”  At 3,800 metres above sea level it is the best place to get altitude sickness and sea sickness at the same time.

   On our first day by the water we took a slow boat to Isla del Sol, birthplace of much of the Incan mythology.  The scenery and the weather were both pleasant and the hilly trail didn’t leave us breathless so we were satisfied that we had acclimatised to hiking at altitude.  Our second day by the lake was Good Friday and from what we had been told, Copacabana had the best celebrations in Bolivia.

   We had enjoyed the Palm Sunday service in Sucre the previous week and talked a couple of German girls into joining us for the Good Friday evening mass.  There was promise of a parade afterwards for us to look forward to.  The service was watched over by lifelike effigies of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, both of whom sustained a steady stream of pilgrims pressing through the crowd to lay hands on them. 

   After an hour the church was packed and thronging.  Jesus was taken from the cross and interred in a glass coffin.  We had the surreal experience of joining a procession of men dressed in white robes and pointy white hoods who escorted Jesus and his mother out of the church and around town, stopping periodically to mark the fourteen Stations of the Cross.  The priest led the escort, continuing to preach from a PA system on the back of a Toyota pick-up truck while the congregation packed the narrow streets of Copacabana with candles and responsive prayer.  In between stations a truly dreadful marching band provided musical accompaniment.  They atoned for their lack of talent and with sheer stamina, playing the same 20 bars of music over and over again for 90 minutes as Jesus was held up by the traffic around the main square.

It's the journey, not the destination

   The hard thing with writing is that when you leave it a little while you fall out of the habit and by the time you sit down with intent you have too many ideas that should have previously been expressed in a much better order.  So I’m going to put one down up front that just came to me: mum, why haven’t you commented on our blog yet?

   We left Rio for Ilha Grande on Monday and since then we have been without internet or even a reliable power source so I’ve continued writing in my diary but it becomes silly trying to transfer daily prose into the past tense.  We spent our last full day in Rio ascending Pão de Açucar (Sugarloaf Mountain), after reinstating all of Kizzy’s bank cards that had seized up in the flurry of international transactions.  The views across the harbour to Corcovado and the Christo Redentor were spectacular but the day was a bit hazy for good photos (see photo, Panu).  We ended up strolling the beach in the afternoon where the atmosphere was more relaxed than on previous days.  It seems like Rio has a lovely family day vibe on Sundays, certainly along the beaches.  It was as though there were more women around and fewer young-ish men and that happened to relax things.  Occasional bars along the beachfront had live music and there were markets in the near side of the road which was closed to traffic for the day.  There were also three girls dancing suggestively to the live music at one bar and that was a trap that had drawn a certain type of men all into one discreet place that was easily circumnavigated.  Sadly we were too terrified of being mugged (guidebook: "do not take anything to the beach") that we left our camera behind on the first day with the lovely blue skies and sunshine.

   We journeyed to Ilha Grande the following day, by minibus and schooner, with our destination Camping e Cabanas Paradiso.  The camping is obvious – reserve a pitch by the beach, simple.  The cabanas?  We were in a tent.  I don’t mind but the booking was for a cottage.  There are no cottages so I didn’t make a fuss about the tent. 

   To get there we walked for an hour and a quarter in the rain, up and down a very slippery hill.  In a way the rain was a blessing – it gave me an excuse for being drenched on arrival.  In actual fact I was dripping with sweat having carried 25kg (still too heavy!) up and down the hill.  Incidentally, some chap who writes for the Rough Guide tested this and the average backpack weight is 17kg, so between the two of us (Kizzy: 11kg) we’re not far off that.  I need to get more stuff into her bag while she sleeps.

   At “Paradiso” it really was quite lovely.  It’s a small campsite (let’s be honest) on a small beach just a short walk from a slightly less small beach (Palmas), a good hour from anything approaching a link to civilisation.  When we were in the cable car up to Sugarloaf Mountain Kizzy remarked that it was strange to have days in which your attention was focussed on the events before you and not on some more distant anticipation.  Lying on the beach in that remote-ish corner of Ilha Grande I could not think of a more apt thought.  After the rush and bustle of the last month in London, to be in a place where filling your day takes attention to each relaxing detail was a staggering change.  However, I must admit to also being staggered by the ridiculously alcoholic welcome Caiprinhas at that point.  I think I have a fair constitution but two of those at Paradiso (Kiz was gone on the first mouthful of hers) and I was struggling to walk straight. 

Am I not adventurous?

   Kizzy has something of a bone to pick with those who suggested that she might not be the adventurous type.  She has now braved the journey between Palmas and Abraão – one hour and 15 minutes up and down a slippery and treacherous clay track (see photo, Panu) no fewer than 5 times, one of those carrying a heavy pack in the rain.  On two occasions she braved the “rock of death” (again, see photo, Panu) and on Wednesday morning took a valiant role in the massacre of the invading ant horde (no photos – still dealing with post-traumatic stress).  She is very brave and I am very proud of her.  Incidentally, she managed to reconcile the massacre with her vegetarianism: “they’re invading our cottage!”, “It’s self-defence” and my favourite, “they’re like machines, they just won’t die!”

   We recovered from that ordeal with a lovely few hours on what felt like our own private beach with blue skies and morning sunshine topping up Kizzy’s tan and threatening to burn me through my factor 30 sunscreen.  In fact it did burn me (see photo) but on the bright side I have discovered that that my new sunglasses have a super-power: they can tell how burnt I will look in an hour’s time, long before it is visible to the naked eye.  I thought they were rose-tinted at first – I looked a little pink through the sunnies but without them I retained an unblemished pasty hue.  I stayed in the sun for another 30 minutes and then went for lunch, still luminous white.  Over the next hour the pink emerged, finally settling on a tender fuscia.  Lesson for the day – listen to the sunnies and stay out of the midday sun!

   We met a lovely couple at Paradiso, Wellington and Tachi, two missionaries from Sao Paulo travelling with Wellington’s sun Viktor and a friend Marcel.  Viktor must be about 14.  He’s a sweet kid who speaks English well and has an endearing habit of patting me on the shoulder every time we passed each other, although with the sunburn I had to stifle the winces for fear of hurting his feelings. 

   Yesterday (finally, almost up to date) we took the water taxi back to Abraão (no way were we doing that journey again with packs and sunburnt shoulders).  Although it was prohibitively expensive (£40 for a twenty minute trip) it was actually quite nice to see the island from offshore and Kiz was very excited at her first trip in a “speedboat” – it was a tinny with a 40hp outboard on the back.  

   Ilha Grande was lovely – we made new friends on the transfer there and then on departure too so I was able to give out the first of the calling cards (very exciting and self-fulfilling moment!).  It seems that couples naturally gravitate towards couples, and unsurprisingly the two couples we’ve met are both from Australia.  The cricket bat seems to attract them!  I knew it was a good idea.  We had a lovely dinner in Paratry last night: we’re cheap so we went somewhere (with our new friends Ben and Zac from Melbourne) that you pay by the kilo so we could load up on almost weightless salads and then treated ourselves to some Acai for dessert – thanks for the tip Farhan.  Paraty is a charming seaside village with cobbled streets and pretty little shops and lots of beautiful beaches.  Now that it’s stopped raining we might go visit some of them.

From the Hilton to Che Lagarto

Yesterday

   Four hours after landing in Rome we were happily ensconced in our room at the Hilton, having washed and refreshed both ourselves and our belongings.  This was to prove an unfortunate contrast to Rio where it took four hours just to check in to the hostel.  We reassured ourselves during the wait that at least this way we had successfully managed half a day in Rio before being mugged for our backpacks with all our worldly belongings (good luck running off with my backpack – still too bloody heavy!).

   Rome on Thursday was a joy.  We had a leisurely stroll from the Piazza Campodiglioni to the Trevi Fountain.  Beautiful blue skies and sunshine – I was in shirtsleeves for the entire January day.  We took in the Spanish steps, the Colliseum and the Roman Forum as well before heading back to the Fountain for dinner and then off to the hotel to pick up our bags and check in for the flight to Rio. 

   Landing in Rio was marvellous.  Patchy clouds prevailed but it just looked hot and the in flight information forecast a high of 36 degrees.  At the airport, amidst the wreckage of torn and broken luggage that emerged at baggage reclaim, our bags appeared pristine and unharmed – a minor miracle by the look of everyone else’s.  The bus into Rio took us past the Macarana stadium and between Sugarloaf Mountain and Christo Redentor.  We found our way from the bus stop to the hostel without any drama and assumed the self-congratulatory airs of a couple who had successfully navigated what the guidebook implies is the most beautiful and also the most dangerous city you are likely to encounter. 

   At the hostel it turned out they had no record of our booking but this did not come as a surprise to the girl at the desk, it’s a regular occurrence evidently.  Although they had no space at Che Lagarto, she found us an apartment near another hostel, which would be ready for us “soon”.  Needless to say “soon” is a flexible notion.  As for the apartment, we travelled to various places in Copacabana looking for an address that didn’t exist.  At one point we talked our way into a seedy looking tenement block and knocked on the door of suite 504 to be greeted not by the manager but by three young men in various states of undress trying to escape the midday heat.  The confusion playing across all five faces in that doorway was something of a relief – it was nice to know our response was a universal one and that we weren’t going nuts. 

   Having booked into a single bedroom with shared bathroom facilities, we are now settled into a two bedroom apartment with our own kitchen, bathroom and separate toilet.  We are not entirely sure if this has anything to do with the hostel where we were booked (and have already paid).  But the chap who let us in and gave us the key seemed pretty happy to leave us to it until Segunda-feira (Monday) so I’m sure we’ll work it out then.  If not, we’re leaving early anyway.

Today

   We’ve just spent another day in Rio.  I say day but it’s only 12:45, we just made a mess of our clocks and thought it was nearly 5pm.  It wasn’t until we were walking back to our apartment that we realised every single clock in the city couldn’t be wrong by precisely 4 hours.  There we were, lying on the beach and taking pleasure that for the predicted 38 degrees, it wasn’t actually unbearably hot.  We marvelled at how it wasn’t that busy for a weekend, and the madness of people jogging past in the midday sun. 

   The two glorious expanses of Copacabana beach and Ipanema beach must take at least two hours to walk from one end to the other.  Two deep bands of sand, each curving away in a gentle ark from Ipanema point, which divides the two.  At what it seems was 8:20 this morning, Copacabana seemed ridiculously large and empty.  It’s only the crowds of tourists and Brazillians that put the beach into perspective.  I don’t know how many people it takes to make 5km of beach look full, but there were that many people down there today.  On the beach, in the cafés and ten deep in the water for most of Ipanema and the more sheltered stretch of Copacabana.

   The other thing we noticed walking back from the beach is the security situation.  Every apartment block almost without fail has what is effectively a cage around the entryway, as though expecting a hostile visitation.  These high metal railings and enclosures aren’t threatening or ugly, necessarily.  They are striking by how matter of fact they are.  Not an afterthought or an addition sparked by some unfortunate disturbance.  These features are part of the building design.  It’s one of a number of characteristics that suggests an undercurrent of insecurity within relatively prosperous beach-side neighbourhoods that back on to the edgier favelas. That said, my highlight has been the traffic cops.  I’m not sure they’re actually police, I think they just direct traffic, but somehow in their baggy trousers, flouro vests and sunglasses these guys manage to make the job look pretty cool.