Titicaca

Titicaca lake is certainly a not-to-be-missed stop if you ever come to this part of the globe. The average altitude, according to a tourist guide here, is 3910 metres above sea level. This means a number of things. First, the sky has a sort of magic blue color. A bit like when you fly in a plane, although this time you are actually on the ground. I wish I could take this sky to Belgium. The reflection of the sky on the lake itself also gives this nice colour to the water. The problem with this environment is that the sun hits you really badly, and the differences of temperature between sun and shade can be something like 10 to 15 degrees (my estimate). You need to wear a sombrero to protect your head -I bought one that makes me look like a "guiri". People keep talking me in English when I wear it-, solar protection for your skin, and be careful not to catch
a cold -I got one, which is not very nice when you are travelling. Other typical problems involve altitude sickness, although I've been already a few days in highlands, and I don't have that kind of problems anymore.

In order to see the lake properly I took a two day tour through some of the islands. First we went to one of the Uros. These are artificial islands made of reed by the locals, who actually live on them. Second stop was the island of Amantani. There's no hotel there, so we stayed with the people of the island. Adobe houses, no running water, no electricity ... it was also quite an experience. About electricity, they did have an instalation, but it seemed not to be working. This time I avoided any questions not to be embarrased once again. The following day we went to Taquile island. This was also quite an interesting place for two things. First, locals were ruled by a sort of comunist like regime. But the other surprising thing is that people were not wearing traditional Peruvian costumes, but Catalan. It seems that a certain Mr. Taquile -Catalan- was
ruling the island for some time, and imposed this kind of dressings. Perhaps somebody should notify the fathers of today of the Catalan nation about their role in the Spanish adventure in America...

And well, I'm currently in La Paz, Bolivia. My first impressions of Bolivia is that it is poorer than Peru. Prices are at least two or three times lower, and things also seem a bit more messy. Unfortunately, as I am still carrying my cold and my stomach is once again a bit funny, I will not be able to explore the city. I am limiting myself to the minimum, which is arranging the details for a tour in the salar de Uyuni in a couple of days time. That should be a series of mindblowing landscapes a few hundred kilometres from here, already on my way to Argentina. The Bolivian part of the tour has actually been shortened, as I have run out of time. Some of you will be back to work next Thursday (1st September), and I only have two more weeks of travelling. I should also be back to a normal life very soon :-(

Cuzco

Cuzco, El Cusco in new Spanish, or Qosqo, the oficial name of the town in Quechua language is the touristic capital of Peru. A pretty town by itself, it is also a typical base for visiting the famous Machu Picchu and several other Inca ruins. Most of the historical town centre consists of Spanish style constructions built on the top of previous Inca buildings. Lots of stone, narrow streets, arcs, "soportales", plazas, churches, ... On Saturday evening, as it was raining, I had the impression of being walking in Santiago de Compostela. There are also many nice cafes and restaurants, filled mainly with toursits. Prices, although cheap for us, are still too high for the average Peruvian.The other day I was walking in a less touristy area and discovered quite a few restaurants offering a menu for the ridiculous price of 30 Eurocents. I chose the one with most people in -supposedly the best one- and had my cheapest meal ever, even cheaper than the ones in Belarus. The experience was interesting, not for the food itself, but because I had to mix with the locals. Of course, tables were shared, and I noticed that nobody excepting me wasted anything at all. Unlike me, they finished their soup up to the last drop, and left the plate almost clean. The rice, they didn't leave a single grain, and they also cleaned the meat bones eating even the fatty parts I had left aside. I felt a bit ashamed and remembered the discussions with my friend Joao about being needy and finishing your meal without leaving any leftovers.Anyway, I do not always eat in that kind of restaurants. I try a bit of everything. The day before yesterday I indulged myself with one of the local specialities, Cuy al horno. Cuy, in case you don't know it -I didn't- is like a guinea pig, and is cooked in one piece. They asked me if I wanted it sliced, and I say yes. But to my surprise, they only made two perfect cuts, one longitudinal and one transversal. So there it was in the plate the poor thing cut in four. You could see the little legs -with the nails-, the face -with the teeth, smiling-, and as I turned it over I got a first hand practical course on cuy anatomy. Quite an impressing view. I just thought of taking a picture when I had almost finished eating, so I only took as a souvenir a portrait picture of my Cuy. About taste, yes, it was good, with different flavours as you change from one part to the other of the animal. Just, cuy is not advisable if you like pets too much, if you are easily impressed, or if you like eating fast -lots of little bones.More stuff. I've come across counterfait money, both coins and notes. For the coins I don't worry too much - you can easyly get rid of them. But with notes, you really have to keep your eyes opened. And here, as well as everywhere else in Peru, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people trying to sell or do something for tourists. The all call you "amigo"; I didn't know I had so many friends here. You have taxis horning for you or stopping at your side, people selling cigarrets, drinks, etc, offering to clean your shoes (even if you wear sandals), selling crafts, touristic tours, trying to grab you inside restaurants, or sometimes posing ready to let you take a picture with them for a tip. Except for driving taxis, children perform all of these jobs as well as adults, sometimes even during school hours. I find it really sad when I see these kids, some very young, telling you in a very begging like voice "amiiigo, compreme aaaalgo", or "amigo, foto, amigo" as they open their hands asking for money. The good thing about children is they are naturally curious, and they soon forget about selling stuff to ask you questions about your country, football team,...About Machu Picchu, it is worth the visit, but it is a money making machine flooded with tourists. It is beter to visit it at 6am, but you still get an odd feeling when queueing for a bus at 5.30 with other two hundred tourists. Arent't we all like sheep? Of course, there as well as anywhere else, foreingers pay higher prices. I was lucky to bring my ULB student card and I paid 10.5 USD instead of 21 when entering the site. I still had to pay the full price of the train and bus, 75 USD (Remenber that in non-touristic areas you can have a full meal for less than a Euro).Talking about my student card, carrying it with me can turn extremely useful at times. Last night I had a deja-vu experience when the lock of my hotel room broke again (different hotel). This time I had left my knife inside, but as I carried the student card I managed to open the door with it to the astonishment of the hotel owner. I guess I will be able to do this professionally in case I don't manage to get a job when I go back. It's good to have all sort of skills, although I'm not sure I'll put this one in my CV.Finally, in case you follow my trip on a map, I'm off to Puno now, on the shore of the lake Titicaca. This , and perhaps some of the islands, will be my last stop in Peru before proceeding to Bolivia.

El condor pasa

I'm currently waiting for my night bus to Cuzco, and since I have all my luggage with me I thought it would be safer to get into a cybercafe than to wander around Arequipa. I arrived a little while ago from a two day tour around the Colca canyon, one of the deepest of the world. Of course, there were some very nice landscapes -once again you'll have to wait for the pictures-, but the most interesting stuff was condor spotting. I've taken quite a few shots from very close, both video and still pictures. I missed my reflex camera though. I'm pretty much convinced by digital photography by now, but my camera is just a standard one. Good digital ones are still too pricy for the aficionado I am. Anyway, I had the chance to visit this area, some 250 km from here, and which is, despite the unpaved roads, stuffed with tourists. Everybody on an organized tour, doing the same thing, almost at the same time. I felt a bit like on a touristy trap -good training for Cuzco and Machu Pichu-, but it was worth anyway. By the way, last night I had the chance to reconcile myself with my handyman abilities. The door lock of my hotel room broke and I managed to force it with the cheap chinese multiuse knife I had bought in Paraguay. A good investment after all.
About Arequipa, I haven't spent too much time here. This is the second biggest city in Peru, and it has a very nice plaza de armas and a few interesting streets and churches around it. They are built in a Spanish style, using local stone, and they could well be part of a Spanish town. But besides this, there is not much more of touristic interest here. A couple of volcanos above 5,000 metres are not far from the town centre, which give nice views. I used part of my time shopping trying to get some warm clothes in order to go to the canyon. Unfortunately most of the winter clothes were already sold out -end of season-, but I still managed to get a wool jumper on sales for a ridiculous price. I made good use of it, as it was pretty chill last night. I slept at close to 4,000 metres above sea level.
The other stop I made since my previous post was Ica. This was a town not far from the coast, which is actually an oasis surrounded by desert. I visited the local museum -interesting archeological items- and a winery, all arranged by my hotel in Paracas. About the wine, the weather is too hot for making proper wine there, so they make Pisco -local liquor- and a number of variations with different flavours and levels of alcohol. They let us try a bit of everything, including a couple of odd things such as Pisco destiled with lemons and a sort of Bayleys made with some local fruit.

Pacific coast

I got some complaints that I don't write very much lately. Well, I've been on the move, and I haven't had so much time. And I was also ill last weekend -stomach problems, I guess you don't want to know the details-. Anyway, I completed my visit to Iquitos including a tour around Belen. This is the lowest part of the town, by all means. The locals call it the Venice of the Amazones; my judgment, it is more of a slum, with very poor people living in pretty bad conditions. As the river is low right now, some of the floating houses are actually sitting on the ground -which is basically trash-, so not a very nice view. Interesting though, not for the pleasure of sight, but as a first hand ilustration of how hard life can be. I hired a local to show me around, and ended up paying him a little fortune, 20 soles. I miscalculated a bit the prices, and I only learned later that the dish of the day in a nearby restaurant could cost 3 or 4 soles. Of course, he was a very happy man, and well, what can I say, 20 soles is just 5 Euros. You won't get very far with that in Belgium. And I would probably have paid more to an agency anyway. The following day I flew from Iquitos to Lima, finally leaving the jungle behind, and arriving in the dessert. I wasn't aware of that, but it seems that most of the Pacific coast of Peru is a pure dessert. Only the valleys around the rivers that flow from the Andes are some sort of oasis. But for the rest, it is as dry as it can be.
I wasn't too impressed by Lima. I saw a few nice colonial buildings, including some churches, the plaza de armas, and a couple of museums. I also got a guided tour around two more modern neighbourhoods, Miraflores and Barranco. Ruby, a limeña I met recently in Leuven showed me around. (¡Muchas gracias de nuevo, Ruby!). This more modern part was probably the nicest, with some parks by the sea and some very colourful houses.
A few other things. Music around town was suddently more familiar. I heard La Oreja, Hombres G, Alex Ubago, and even Ana Belén. Still, it wasn't quite as when I heard la Gallina Turuleta in Colonia, Uruguay. Another thing, taxis here are not metered, so you need to arrange the price with the driver before you jump in. Typically they try to charge a few extra soles to tourists. And yeap, the memories of the Spanish presence are still quite present. History is divided between before and after the Spanish domination. Life in the capital was dominated by Spanish born, first class citizens, until the 1820s. Pizarro's tomb in the cathedral doesn't seem to raise very good feelings. I heard already quite a few times that "the Spanish stealed our gold". And then, of course, a matter of national pride, independence. I am currently staying at a hotel a hundred meters away from the place where Jose San Martin arrived in Perú. He met here with Bolivar as both were leading revolutions from the South and the North of the continent, so a very important place for Peruvian history.
By the way, this place is called Paracas, and besides the historical importance, it is only a fishing and touristic village near a natural reserve. I had a tour this morning around some islands near by and the reserve itself and I saw thousands of birds of many types I cannot even remember. There were also sea lions, penguins, flamingos, and even dolphins. The islands are covered of course with droppings of all those birds, although every 5 years they come and remove them. It seems they are very good as fertilizer. In fact, the business can be so profitable that sometime in the 19th century 80% of the Peruvian GDP was based on "droppings economy". The importance has dimished though, as there are more chemical products in the market. But the droppings are still exported.
While in the reserve, we drove on a road made of salt. I wouldn't believe the guide, but we he stopped and scrached a bit the ground. It had actually become black because of the tyres of vehicles driving through. Amazing. And as it never ever rains here, there's no problem of getting diluted with the water. Interesting, isn't it?
Tomorrow I'm moving further South to Ica and then Arequipa. Hopefully some more interesting stuff down there.

The Amazonian experience

I think I've been to some of the most interesting places so far since last time I made a post.
Last Saturday I visited an indigeneous family that collects latex from trees in Brazil. The father -perhaps my age- spoke Portuguese very badly, but it was cool to talk and play with his 5 children. They gave me some of their little treasures: seeds of good luck, and unfortunately I didn't have anything to give in return.
On Sunday I took a bot to Puerto Nariño, a Colombian village 90km up the Amazon. There are about 3,000 people living there, and probably half of them are children. I stayed there a couple of days, and I must say they were extremely nice to me. Some of them even memorized my name and greeted me quite warmly whenever they would see me around. By the way, there were no cars in the village -and neither roads-, and the only land motor vehicle was a tractor. They had electricity from 6pm to 10pm sharp, and a community phone that could be used only a few hours a day. They had GSM reception, though. Local population was partly indigenous and partly Colombians from other parts of the country. As well as in Leticia, many people moved there looking for peace and some rest from guerrilla and crime.
And on Monday I hired a guide together with some other tourists and we walked a few hours through the jungle to San Martin, an indigenous community of about 400 people (Ticunas). They really lack a lot of things up there. They did not have any more drinking water as they had run out of the rain water they store -it's dry season now, and it hasn't rained for quite a while-. They are currently drinking boiled water from the river, but get diarreas from time to time. They also had a complete electricity installation reaching most houses. They received it as a gift some time ago, but the generator had broken down and there was nobody to repair it. I felt most useless when I said that I was an engineer and somebody sugested that I could have a look at it. I've never seen one such machine in close, and I'm not sure I would have been able to make any sense out of it. We stayed in total a couple of hours, talked to some people, bought some crafts, and payed the visitor tax that the chief of the village charged us, 2,000 pesos each (some 70 EURO cents), not much for the many needs they have. It was a very interesting experience to reflect about how much we have in our western world, about fair trade, and a unique chance to have some contact with this very humble but loving people.
The way back we did it in peque-peque, a sort of canoe 4 metres long and 80 cm wide with a simple motor. There were also several wholes in the boat, and seven of us on it, so you can imagine how much fun it was.
At present I am in the Peruvian town of Iquitos. I arrived today after travelling more than 600 kilometres in the Amazon river by fast boat. A 12 hour trip that started at 4 am, so I am pretty tired. According to the Lonely Planet this is the biggest town in the world without road links. You can only come here by boat or by plane. It has a very different look from Brazil. Roads are filled with motorbikes, motocarros and just a few cars. Motocarros are motorbikes modified in order to have two rear wheels and some sort of charriot to carry several passengers. I will take some pictures tomorrow, and will also explore around a little bit more. The local market is not far from my hotel, so that's promising. But now I will go and try to have some dinner, and then go to sleep. I think I need it after this long day.

Tabatinga & Leticia

I'm one thousand kilometers away from Manaus, and I am still in the Amazone. The jungle is absolutely gigantic. I'm currently staying in the Brazilian town of Tabatinga, which is border both with Colombia and Peru. Life seems to take place more in the Colombian side (named Leticia), so I spend here most of the day. Crossing the border is as easy as crossing the street (by the way, Colombia has a reputation for being a dangerous country, but this place is guerrilla free, so don't worry too much). Both towns, especially Leticia, are full of life. Buzzling motorbikes everywhere, lots of people in the streets, and terrible melodramatic latin music (Cadena Dial style) full volume in every bar, home or business with the door open (almost all of them).The most anoying thing so far are the light hours ('tis dark right now). Being close to the Equator, there is daylight between 6am and 6pm, and this I presume all year long. But 6pm is still too early to go to bed, and locals remain in the street until close to midnight. Just, being dark I don't feel like adventuring into new places. I feel pretty safe here though, but it's always good to take precautions. About heat, I'm more or less coping. It's fine if I am still, but I begin to sweat as long as I start moving. This makes me end up drinking several litres per day of tropical fruit juices -delicious-. About water, I am a bit suspicious. They don't sell mineral water here, but "pure water", purified following a certain industrial process. But the company name is Rio (=river), so I wonder if they are actually bottling the Amazon. Today I went kayaking in a lake and a river nearby. It was quite fun, although I ended up very tired. I guess I should exercise a bit more, especially my arms. I suppose that typing in the computer doesn't develop much my biceps, does it? Other things, as well as in Manaus, the river is a very important part of life here. Transportation of goods and people take place mainly by boat, food (fish) may come from there too, and even a number of people actually live on the river (floating houses). In addition, the waterfront is typically the best place for making contacts, arranging trips, and so on. For tomorrow I am planning a visit to a Brazilian community that lives on caucho, and I was promised a gastronomic experience too. We'll see. And the day after tomorrow I may go to Puerto Nariño, a nearby village where I should be able to arrange some more trips in the jungle. Then, somewhere next week, I will move on to Peru.

From the tropic to the Equator

I left Rio with a winter of 26 degrees, and arrived in Manaus, dry season, and a temperature that I don't even want to know. It's very hot here, very humid, and I'm sweating all day long. At least many places have air conditioning, and I just hope my body gets used to this climate before I go out in the jungle.

Manaus is the capital city of the state of Amazonia, with a population somewhere between 1 and 2 million people. It is also very different from the other parts of Brazil I've seen so far. Indigeneous seem to form the majority of the population, so it is clear now that I am a tourist. Locals don't bother giving me leaflefts with advertising for their shops. In Rio I could be mistaken for a Brazilian as long as I didn't wear shorts -my untanned legs would tell I haven't seen the sun for quite a while.

I went out this morning, and I could see that this is really another world. First it took me ages to find an ATM that accepted one of my cards. In addition, banks were packed with people (begining of the month?) and the security guards didn't seem to appreciate me looking around for a Master Card sticker. I soon understood that I should not enter a bank with my sun glasses on. With money in my pocket I decided to buy some phone cards and give a call to my parents. The problem I found this time is that most public phones downtown don't seem to be ready for international phone calls. And the ones that are (only DTMFs, for the techies) don't allow conversations longer that 20 or 30 seconds. Quite a challenge. The third activity this morning was finding a boat to go tomorrow to the "Encontro das Aguas", the place where the Solimoes and Rio Negro rivers meet. I finally agreed to go with a certain Manoel, who gave me his card both in Portuguese and English. The English version says: Lancha Anaconda, we moke jungle trips and ovemight. We shall go to that point (12 km from here), try to fish some piranhas, and make a short walk in the jungle.

After doing my duties for the day I was free to walk around and discover a bit the city. It has many colonial buildings, including an Opera house inspired in Paris' (like many others around the world). But the most interesting part was to see the people and the trading. I went to the local market, where you can buy a lot of herbs, fruits, fish and crafts. I discovered there that a certain plant, unhas de gato, can cure several illneses, including AIDS. I had a superb guarana, carefully prepared with almond and other nuts and spices that I didn't know. I also saw people with typewriters offering to write letters, bills, etc, and Real Madrid T-shirts sold for less than 5 EUR (starting price without negotiating. Anybody interested? They have the main European squads, and also the Brazilian national team. Of course, all oficial). Anyway, this was just to give you an overview of how is life here, very very different from Rio or SP. But this is also part of Brazil, this great country.

I was expecting to meet here Craig (MBA, PT1) who had scheduled a business trip to Manaus one of these days. But he hasn't replied to my mails, so I don't know where he is. If by any chance you are reading this, Craig, I'm staying at 10 de Julho hotel, but I will leave next Thursday. You can try to leave a message at the reception.

Some pics

So, here are some pictures. One is from Sao Paulo downtown, and the other one from Rio, view of the southern part of the city from the Corcovado -the mountain with the famous image of Christ-. You can see the Lagoa dos Patos and some of the Atlantic beaches.
As I already mentioned, it is quite a pain to upload files, so I'm afraid you'll have to wait till I'm back to see the whole lot.