Hotel 6 Agosto

5-Jan-2003 - Woke up to the sound of roosters, got up, suited up, left our non-essentials in the rec room and set out. I changed a traveller's check and we got on a boat for a tour of Isla del Sol.

Isla del Sol, in Lake Titicaca, is the legendary birthplace of the sun in Inca mythology. According to legends, the god Viracocha and the first Incas appeared here.

The boat set off and moved around counter clockwise around the island and deposited us on the north end of the island, at the village of Cha'llapampa. The plan was that the boat would be at the southern end of the island and we would hike the five kilometer hike down the island, with a guide accompaning us for part of the hike, explaining the many ruins that dot the island.

Cha'llapampa

The reality turned out to be that Isla del Sol was, in a sense, a tourist trap. While the three villages maintain what is for the most part a traditional lifestyle, they also profit big time off of foreign tourists hiking down the island. Periodically, we would walk by small stands with villagers selling junk food. At one point, we came across a bunch of children with an alpaca offering to have our pictures taken when I declined, they raised a small rope and said "¡No pasa!" (translation: You can't pass). I've heard of highway robbers setting up roadblocks, but never elementary school aged ones. But I did get to practice my limbo...

Sights of Isla Del Sol

Big beatles on shit

We got to the village of Yumani, at the southern end of the island. We got some food, and walked through the village to get to the docks. Walking through the village was neat; the villagers (except for the ones manning the afore mentioned stands) were living in much of the same way they probably were hundreds of years ago.

More of Isla Del Sol and Yumani

That didn't stop me from being eager to head out, I was hot and sunburned and had a splitting headache, presumably from the altitude.

We got back to Copacabana, got our room straightened out for the night, and figured out our plans for the next day. While we were doing this, a shoeshine boy came up to us and I had him shine my shoe, which was quite gnarly from the hike. Nice kid, he did a good job and we had a brief conversation in my extremely limited Spanish.

We decided to attempt to get to Cusco tomorrow, which would be an all day trip. To do this, we would need to get an early morning ride to the Peruvian border, cross over into Yunguyo, get a bus to Puno, and from there get a bus to Cusco. While in Puno, we would call ahead and get reservations for a place to stay in Cusco - it is a bad idea to get into Cusco late at night without an immediate place to go.

I also noticed that I was missing my immigration card, presumably it fell out when I was reserving the tour. I mentioned this to the guys, and Pradip said that he didn't get one at all when he crossed over from Chile. We just figured that we would deal with it when we crossed the border the next day.

After deciding on these plans, we paid for our room, got dinner at "La Nimbo", which had seats lined with alpaca skins. It was also the first time that I had banana on pizza. Apparently, the proprietor for a while thought we were Brazillian; in his attempt to verify that he did an amusing Capoeira impression. I almost never pass off as anything other than pureblood USA, but Pradip being south Indian, could very well pass off as being Afro-Brazillian. After the meal was done, we got some sleep.

6-Jan-2003 - Got up at 5:30, only to find out that the water wasn't running, despite the claim that they had 24 hour hot water. I was not very pleased, because it was two days since I had a shower. So I took my existing bottled water and attempted to shampoo and wash myself with less than a liter of water. Corey would later identify the master switch sitting outside that they would later use to turn on the water.

We got to the Plaza Sucre in Copacabana by 7 AM and got a taxi to the Peruvian border. The taxi got a flat tire on the way, so we had to stop while the driver changed it. When we got to the border, we learned that it would not be open until 8:30 AM. So we hung out outside for the time being. I tried a local soft drink, Inka Kola. The stuff tasted like liquified lollipops.

In the end, the Bolivian authorities did not care that we didn't have our immigration cards. I was relieved because I was concerned that they would have fined us or attempted to extract a bribe.

Yunguyo

We then walked across the border (which was the first time that I've crossed a border and a time zone boundary on foot) and Peruvian immigration was straight forward. We got a taxi into Yunguyo and from there boarded a bus to Puno.

While riding through the Peruvian countryside, you can tell that Peru is a bit more developed than Bolivia. For one thing, telephone and power lines were consistently following the path of the road.

We got to Puno around 11 AM. Puno is a very dusty dumpy city, in many ways it seemed to embody the stereotype of the dusty south of the border town. We then went to the bus terminal to investigate transportation to Cusco. We soon learned what a mess the Peruvian bus system was. We started talking with someone that we thought represented the bus company, and we got tickets to Cusco as well as booking a place to stay there (he showed us a brochure), but it later became clear that he was more of a travel agent, and a backwards one at that. We were told that we didn't need assigned seats, but after we sat down we had to move when the person that had those seats arrived. We were also told that the bus was non-stop, but the bus stopped at Juliaca. Neither of these proved to be a major problem (or at least in the short term), for we were soon underway.

The ride to Cusco took about seven hours, and was uneventful. The weather got a bit more ugly, and at one point we had to stop beacuse a herd of cows was crossing the road.

We got into Cusco, and a taxi was waiting to take us to the hotel, along with the lady that ran the place. We went to the hotel, checked in, listened to a long sales pitch for a tour, and met up with a German traveller named Fabian that we saw at the Bolivian border. We went into town and had dinner and beer at the Cafe Mystique...

We got back and went to our rooms, and realized something bad - the hotel that we were staying at was not the one we were told that we were staying at, and the place that we were at (called the Euro-Hostal) was in a part of town that we were warned to avoid. The fellow in Puno pulled a fast one on us. And since the voucher for the hotel specified the name of the promised hotel, the lady that ran this hotel was in on it also.

Needless to say, we were all quite pissed.

We decided to conk out for the night and take care of things in the morning.