Cuzco to La Paz

Sorry not to have written for a while. We´ve been pretty busy though and we haven´t had much internet. In the last week we´ve travelled from Cuzco down to Puno on the Peruvian shores of Lake Titicaca, then to La Paz, and through Bolivia to Cochabamba and now Santa Cruz. Tonight we´re off to Brazil!

We´ve spent a lot of time on buses but the scenery was so amazing. After Cuzco it changed from "normal" mountains into the weirdest landscape. It´s called the altiplano and is really high (all above 3500 metres) but it feels almost like Wales and the valleys are so high that the peaks look like hills. It´s very dry and hostile-looking, almost nothing grows and the houses are pretty spread out. It must be a hard place to live. We saw a few herds of alpaca/llama (and some sheep and cows). Still don´t know which are which but I read that alpaca are smaller and delicate and their wool is used for nice things whilst llama are tougher and their wool is used for ropes and things.

We stayed a night in Puno. It´s at 3800 metres -pretty high! We haven´t had any real problems with the altitude but the hostel kitchen was on the 4th floor and we were pretty out of breath by the time we got there! We spent the next morning on a tour of the floating islands in Lake Titicaca. They built the islands out of reeds, it´s amazing, no idea how they cope at night though- it was so cold! We met a Brazilian lady who´s offered to cook us lunch one day in Rio. We then got a bus over the border and another to La Paz and on the second one we met 3 Brazilians and a german girl. 2 of the Brazilians (a couple) are going to meet up with us in Rio and maybe take us out to some lovely beaches on the Sunday. It was so much fun to speak Portuguese. I´ve been really worried about it but it´s definitely coming back :-)

So now we´re in a new country. It´s noticably different in many wways- much poorer and the places we´ve been are much less on the "gringo trail". I´ll write another blog entry later about the rest of our timein Bolivia before we change country again!

I´ve been trying to put some photos up but it´s not working, may have to try again in Rio!