Give me a home amongst the gum trees

Bus ahoy
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That’s right, gum trees! Em and I were hit with a bit of homesickness on our way into La Paz when we noticed that we were surrounded by gum trees! They started to appear in Copacabana which is on the shore of Lake Titicaca, followed us on the way through to La Paz and just kept popping up all the way into the city - we were waiting to see a kangaroo dash across the road!

As I was saying we traveled through Copacabana to get to La Paz, and had our first adventure on this part of the journey. We were driving along the shore of Lake Titicaca when the bus came to a stop. Looking out the window we could see that we had come to some sort of port on the lake.

There goes our bus and our bags...
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The driver told us all to get out of the bus as it was too heavy with us all inside; in a moment we would see what he meant… As soon as we were all out of the bus he drove it onto a barge that was carrying buses and other vehicles (or trying to) across the lake. It was a bit worrying watching our bus which still had our packs inside get whisked off onto this tiny barge with an outboard motor that would have struggled getting ESSBEE (the two person dinghy at home) across the lake. Furthermore the driver hadn’t really given us any idea of how WE were supposed to get across the lake. Luckily we worked out that we had to catch a ferry (if you could call it that!) over ourselves.

Would you trust this man?
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So we bought our tickets and hopped into our boat and set off on our way. It was the rockiest ride ever, if we thought the motors on the barges were small this thing must have been powered by pedal power! The current was working against us and it was a real struggle to make it across. The other worry was that the captain of the boat looked like a villain out of a James Bond movie - he had that much gold in his mouth (see attached picture).

After arriving on the other side and greeting our bus (and bags) we continued onto La Paz. La Paz is a great city, it is set down the bottom of a valley and all the houses are built on the surrounding hills. It’s a pretty impressive sight which unfortunately I don’t think will come out in the pictures, so you will have to take our word for it.

La Paz
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After much indecision we decided to give the salar a miss due to lack of time and me being a bit under the weather, but we will hopefully get back here some day and do them then.

We have spent most of our time here visiting the various museums and the usual touristy stuff as well as trying to dodge death every time we cross the road. We thought football was the number one sport in Bolivia but now we realize that it’s watching the fear on the gringos’ faces as they try and cross the street without getting killed!