Journal
Peru/Bolivia (March)
Hola from altitude! From Lima I traveled up the coast, to Huaraz, Trujillo and Cajamarca. The views are breathtaking and the people proud of their traditional dress. At night they drink and dance in the street celebrating local festivals.
My experiences of Peruvian buses didn’t leave me with much optimism about the plane that would take me over the Andes back to Lima. I didn’t fancy eating my fellow passengers but I packed a bottle of ketchup just in case. So I was fairly relieved when a modern looking Boeing wheeled up. After Lima it’s been buses and trains all the way to Buenos Aires. First through Nasca, and the famous Nasca lines and on to Cuzco and the famous and biggest tourist attraction of them all, the Inca trail. Afterwards… more hairy bus rides down through Bolivia, the incredible Salt flats, and a train down to the Argentinean border before working my way through Salta and Cordoba and down to Buenos Aires.
Peru and Bolivia are so incredibly different, like a separate continent within South America. The two countries are very similar yet so unlike any of their neighbours. They have a far higher indigenous population than other South American countries. The people are small, quiet and very reserved. It’s almost hard to imagine Peru as once being the home of the mighty Incas. And sadly because of the geography and relative lack of fertile land, they are resigned to live off corn and potatoes or from the Inca legacy and the tourist trail it brings. Peru is different too in that it is often a one-stop destination for many tourists. I met a lot of travellers who took two/three weeks off work to visit only Peru. Because of this the streets are filled with small children begging and looking for tips. The gap between you and them is so wide that you can only ever feel like a tourist. For me, someone who likes to get to chat with the locals, that was disappointing.
Bolivia for me, and for the majority of travellers I’ve spoken too, was a better experience than Peru. The salt flats were the highlight. Four days and 1,000km in a jeep through some of the most incredible terrain I’ve ever seen. The Salt flats (the largest in the world) are blinding. Imagine an entire sea dried up and leaving only a bed of impacted salt, ten metres deep. The surface is uniformly smooth and bright white (as you’d expect). It’s so big that after driving for one hour at 80mph, we reached the middle. Elsewhere we drove through a Daliesque dessert where we could have been on the moon. At night we stayed in tiny villages where the children had never been outside their own small community.
I visited a local school and showed some kids some of my photographs. They were fascinated to see other places and scared of my camera. One kid was brave enough to take a photo of me with his friends but from the way he was holding the camera I’ll be lucky if he got my head in. In another town I challenged the locals to a game of football and almost all of the seventy families came out to watch. The tourists, made up of one Irish, one Scot, two Kiwis and an English girl looked good on paper. But our opponents, five fit teenagers who were used to running around at an altitude of 4,000 metres soon showed us up. After five minutes I was convinced we were in a vacuum and all air had gone. I was ready to collapse. We scored a few consolation goals before physiology got the better of us. Hopefully the altitude training will prepare me well for the might of Argentina & Brazil!
Your traveling friend…
Flavriguez