Home » Peru Brazil Bolivia » Travel to South America (part II)

Traffic on Pan-Americana Highway after huge explosion, I wrote before, was restored and I decided not to go through the head hunters (head shrinkers) territory. They probably have never seen a folding bicyclist and may have a temptation to shrink my head as a souvenir. Instead I started long bus ride to Lima, Peru. However, before I will continue let me finish with Ecuador.

Travel to South America (part II)

Alex Mumzhiu
2006-03-22 14:07:41

Displayed times (last time: )

2002
10 pm

From Michu Picchu I took a long bus ride to Arequipa to see the deepest canyon and biggest condor that flies there. The two days bus tour to the canyon ($15) goes across a 4,800m pass before descending to the canyon, with vertical drops of 1,500m. A 4,800m is an altitude of Mount Blanc. I could not resist the temptation to ride it down on bike. In-spite of protests of my tour guide I exited the bus, unfolded the bike and went down. The lack of oxygen influenced my decision making and I put on gloves and long pants only after the second fall, a pretty bad one. The gravel road was awful and I came down covered with blood and dust. I spent all my stock of band aids and even bought some Gillette razor blades to make some small surgical operations. Everything is OK now.

From Arequipa another bus ride brought me to Puno, a town on the shore of Lake Titicaca. It is the highest navigatable lake on Earth, at 3820 m. Major attractions here are floating islands. Like Eskimos who make everything from caribou, Uros Indians make everything from totora reeds (trosthik). They make boats, houses, tea, clothes, all from the reeds. They eat it and most amazingly they make artificial islands, sort of predecessors of nowadays oil rigs. Island range from small for 2-3 houses to pretty large for a couple dozen houses with town plaza and observation tower. Ground is not shaky but soft. The boats they make are pretty sturdy. I traveled on one of them from one island to another with 20 other tourists. Two guys who made boats for Thor Heyerdall on which he tried to cross the Atlantic Ocean still live here.

To my surprise the lake is clean and the water is blue and very clear. I said to my surprise, because so many beautiful places on Earth, like Tonkin bay in Vietnam, or Guilin in China get trashed as a result of population explosion and poor sanitary habits of that population. The population here unfortunately has sanitary habits ...