Once through the surprisingly smooth border to Bolivia (I had received a few emails from the foreign office website about blockades and strikes at the border) we made our way to the sleepy town of Copacabana, no not the famous one, this one's a bit uneventful. But it was actually a nice break from the hecticness of Puno. Full of dreadlocks, and European travellers who forgot to move on, who's skin you can't tell if it's tanned or just dirty. They just sit on the main street and sell bits of reformed wire as jewellery.
Copacabana is on the Bolivian side if the massive lake titicaca (meaning tit poo by the way). we showed up without a hostel booked and found this amazing little hostel in the lake front, which was decorated with strange wood carvings and ornaments, for £6 a night it was perfect. I thought it was really sweet until just as we had got tucked into bed and Greg decided to tell me it reminded him of The Shining - great.
After a short but sweet stop in Copacabana we took the bus to La Paz. The journey meanders through the foot hills of the Andes, until suddenly you turn the corner and a huge mass of city spans out in front of you in the valley below, not one square inch of bare land remains, all the way up to the surrounding hillsides. The higher it goes the poorer it gets. Suffice to say we put our lungs to the test again by walking round the steep hills of la Paz which is an even mightier winner so far at 3600 m above sea level.
As we decended into the centre of it, it became apparent that this way going to be a hectic place, and it immediately crossed my mind that Greg would hate it for that reason! Strange, as a lot of people told me that they loved La Paz, but i guess it's just not our type of place, ironic since we live in London....but that's different, and at least cleaner and more finished. There was some sort of celebration going on as we arrived and people of all ages were just getting wasted sat on the streets, just our luck too that we arrived late afternoon so people were pretty messy. The bus driver even said don't take pictures or make eye contact as they might smash the windows! Right in the midst of it the bus pulled up a street away from our hostel....
We decided the plan was to get in, get stuff booked and get out. In Bolivia people just love being out and about it seems, if they don't have proper jobs they go on the black market and sell anything from hot dogs to glass vases from makeshift stalls anywhere you can swing a cat. And if they're not doing that they are standing on streets or in the middle of roads waiting for ramshackle buses which look like sardine tins. This makes it a mission to walk anywhere let alone drive which is treacherous. There's a witches Market that sells all manner of potions including dead baby dried lamas, but for us that was the highlight. So after a couple of days wondering about, eating, drinking and playing pool, trying to decide on which amazon jungle tour we should do, I stumbled on an ad in a gringo magazine, and our next adventure was born...
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