Going Solo Part Beebs

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After some time spent waiting in the Trini airport, entertaining ourselves by playing ‘I Spy’ with a variety of species of cockroach, we boarded the tiniest commercial plane I’ve ever been on (if you were above 5ft you couldn’t really stand up). We arrived in La Paz and checked in to Happy Stay (where else?!) and the avuncular owner was so pleased to see me again that he kindly offered a discount on the same room as before. The main event of the following day was a visit with another old friend, Zampoñä Man, in the Museo de Instrumentos Musicales, who was just finishing up his morning lesson. Somewhat ashamed, I proffered our sorry-looking instrument, explaining that it wasn’t our fault she was broken but those careless guys who hurl our luggage onto the buses. He empathized warmly, clearly having had a similar experience himself traveling for concerts. He deftly fixed the panpipes and even wrote up the 2 songs for us again, as we had lost these, then invited us to a concert he was giving on Friday night with a band of folk instrumentalists, which would doubtless have been more genuine than the ‘Musica de los Maestros’ event, but we would be in Copacabana by then. Next time I’m in La Paz…

bolivian kids on isla del sol
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On Thursday we took the 8.30 AM bus to Tiahuanaco (or Tiwanaku) which was an interesting introduction to the history of Lake Titicaca and its environs, as I really didn’t have much knowledge about the individual tribes and periods. I was surprised to learn that the Tiahuanaco epoca was significantly longer than that of the Incas, given how much more we know about the latter. But it makes senses as there are more Inca remains and, unlike the Tiahuanaco people who drifted away to Chile and Argentina when the climate became colder and less hospitable for cultivation, the Incas died out in a much more dramatic way with the bloody invasion of the Spanish. Unfortunately the vast majority of the original pieces at the site were no longer there – the gold having been teefed by the Spanish, everything else relocated to museos in La Paz and Cochabamba. However we did get to see the famous Puerta del Sol where the Incas held an annual solstice celebration on 21 June (the shortest day of the year, being the southern hemisphere and all) which still goes on – all night drinking of moonshine, dancing, LLAMA SACRIFICES (human sacrifices, though more in keeping with Inca tradition, no longer being viable), culminating in the sunrise where the rays are meant to shine directly through the puerta, but the Puerta del Sol was moved to a different position by the Spanish in their plunder for oro, and hasn’t since been returned to its rightful place. We were to miss the solstice by less than 10 days, but I suppose if I want to see 5000 hippies dancing around old rocks I could always make a pilgrimage to Stonehenge. (The Druids – nobody knows who they were or what they were doing.)

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We returned to La Paz and packed in a frenzy in time for the 3.40 bus to Copacabana. As advised by fellow travelers, this really was the best time to go as we got to watch the most gorgeous sunset over the mountain passes and the lake, with plenty of photo opportunities especially on the little raft over part of the lake, which only the turistas chose to go on. We rolled up later that eve at the luxurious Hotel La Cupula/Las Olas, purported to be the BEST HOTEL in all of Bolivia. Quite the change from all the weeks of hostel dwelling. It did however mean not meeting many other guests, just an American family complaining loudly over breakfast about bed bugs, and our Dutch neighbours who called me a ‘hero’ for taking long bus journeys with ‘all the smelly people.’ Right. The room we stayed in, oh wait, 2 FLOOR SUITE, was magnificent – breathtaking vistas of the lake and mountains, ingenious nature-style architecture eg. a massive rock jutting through the stained glass French window (real? fake?) supporting a slab of wood that served as a table or footrest depending on what kind of person you are. The bathroom (where I spent most of my time there showering as Fitzgeralds will tend to do) was a veritable woodland OASIS full of lush plants, rocks and ceramics. Photos will follow! Other than lounging around the hotel with our private butler tending to our electric heater and bringing more mate, our evenings were spent feasting ’pon fresh lake trout in different guises, always superbly delicious, and fondues in La Cupula restaurant (equally as renowned as the buff hotel itself). In the daytime we visited the cathedral, on Sunday the site of an unusual ‘car blessing’ ceremony (more on this later).

artista loco: 'es mi obligacion dibujarte'
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There was also a memorable visit to ‘La Horca del Inca,’ an astronomical observatory point atop a mini mountain. Ok maybe it was more of a hill but was quite the challenge to surmount given the altitude (almost 4000m after the blissful lowlands of Sa Cruz) and midday sun. We also made the trek more difficult for ourselves by unwittingly following a roundabout route over rubbish, shards of glass, and unstable rocky outcrops. Adventurous times! There were zero tourists in sight, even at the horca (which looked like a doorway), just a local 11 year old boy who offered his services as a guide. It being a Friday, I asked him if he was usually in school, but he assured me that it was a day off for everyone as the teachers were collecting their salaries. Hmm… So he showed us the adjacent ‘Flecha del Inca,’ a large natural rock space in the shape of an arrow. He then led us on a 45min route over the next hill, plucking us herbs for seemingly any ailment – headache, stomache ache, altitude sickness, joint pains, anything, it all tasted like mint, and a pod that looks like mangetout but with the equivalent of broadbeans inside. I can’t pronounce, let alone remember, all the Quechua names for these plants, as my mouth won’t do the necessary clicky thing. Crossing over a little fresh water mountain brook, we descended into the tunnels made by the Incas to facilitate more access to the water. Sporting bulksome backpacks, we stumbled down an unlit, practically vertical tunnel full of loose rocks, unmanned apart from the boy who was less than half my size, and frankly, I was afraid of falling and crushing him to death, then back up the same way. The kid, who was incredibly mature, told us he had to go tend to his sheep but that we could easily hitch a ride on the main road. Off he went and we began our cross-country ramble through swampland (curse my cheap trainers!), fields inhabited by grumpy mules, aggressive bulls and ridiculous charging pigs. After a while we did manage to get a taxi with a Bolivian family and several others – 10 of us in a 5 seater car, standard procedure.

riotous fun in arequipa's main plaza
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The highlights of our day bus across the border into Peru included eating tinned pineapple with a rusty old penknife on the ground at the bus station in Puno (a non-descript town where we had to change buses) and half watching a particularly weak Jackie Chan film dubbed in Spanish, ending up in the lovely city of Arequipa around 10pm. The Arequipa experience was in some ways similar to Santa Cruz, in that it is an affluent city, very much centred around the plaza, perfect climate, full of great eateries and drinkeries, and a good place to meet people. Our first day there was spent wandering around the shopping district, where I found an amazing book shop with such tempting reads as ‘Chocolate Caliente para el Alma’ (South American equivalent of Chicken Soup for the Soul) and ‘Los hombres son de Mars, Las mujeres son de Venus,’ but these being too low-brow even for me, I opted for Marquez’ ‘Del amor y demonios’ and some fast paced novella by an arequipeño. I also tried on some one-size-fits-all pink tracksuit bottoms with ‘SEXY GIRLS’ emblazoned on the ass. Classy. And literally every other shop sold the biggest cakes I have ever seen (which is saying something given my time in the Piggly Wiggly supermarkets of the Southern states) with overly elaborate, kitsch designs of football pitches and couples kissing. Later that evening we dined at a pizza place called Los Leños which had walls covered in graffiti by appreciative world travelers. I put in my penny’s worth with a quotation from the film Napoleon Dynamite that we’d seen on the socks in Sucre, ‘What the flip was grandma doing at the sand dunes?’ From there we bar hopped and met some arequipeño uni students, American kaidz, and a crazy grey-bearded artist in a funny hat who told me his family history beginning with his grandfather and wanted to draw me but the people who worked at the bar wouldn’t let him. Bit of a notorious local loco.

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Breakfasting the following day on a sunny terrace near the plaza, I bumped into an arequipeño called Cesar from the night before who I hadn’t spoken to much but he seemed like a joker, and he bade me accompany him to the massive demonstration that was going on all day. This had something to do with fossil fuels, so naturally there was a dude dressed up in a big Elmo costume, and people waving Che banderas, then in the middle of the day things quietened down, the riotous marching bands stopped and sat in the middle of the street for lunch, then it all fired up again post siesta time. The next couple of days I spent mostly hanging out with Cesar and his friend Marco (¡gordito!) who worked at a nearby tourist agency who proclaimed themselves the most popular people in Arequipa and seemed to know absolutely everyone in town. And it’s not a small town! But Cesar was quick to point out his more soulful side, his days spent reading intellectual fiction and writing political poems in the plaza by himself… after dining at a Turkish restaurant, we attempted to go to the cinema but all that was showing was Shrek 3, speeding from place to place on his red moto that had no headlights, took about 5 mins to start up, he had no license and had been driving it for only about a month, and cheerily informed me of the number of near-fatal accidents he’d had. I felt safe. I had a curious meeting with his grandmother, a proper old Quecha-speaking lady (5ft tall, and wide, traditional), who did the most accurate and incongruous impersonation of Paris Hilton saying ‘THAT’S HOTT!’

a view of arequipa's least salubrious neighbourhood
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On my last evening in Arequipa, I went on a 2 hr tour of el Monasterio de Santa Catalina, where, being a monastery, I expected monks to preside. It was actually a nunnery from the 16th century which used to house 400 women, now just 25, and it was as large as a real neighbourhood with picturesque streets all named after Andalusian towns. As it was night, our only source of light and warmth was candle and burning coals, like ye olde tymes, which meant that I couldn’t see the artwork very clearly, but it lent a somber, almost spooky ambiance to the proceedings. In the past the monasterio was solely for second daughters (me!) of well-off families as in order for the girl to enter the monastery, her parents had to donate an amount of silver so large that its value would be equivalent to 10 years living expenses, but if you were poor and really wanted to live in the enclosed community, you could go there as a servant. We saw the baths where the nuns bathed in once a month, fully dressed in habit and headdress, and the confessional box…I asked the guide what the women could possibly have to confess if they were never allowed outside of the building, and she said that maybe some had bad thoughts like jealousy of a fellow nun. We were told the story of a young woman, now in the process of canonization, whose parents took her out of the monastery after a couple of years in order to marry her off but she was so desperate to live a life of holiness and chastity that she escaped and returned to her cloistered existence within the monastery walls. As a nice contrast to the tour, I then went with Cesar and Marco to the French institute where there was a big concert going on with some decent Peruvian musicians, a bar or two and some car parties outside. I was sad to leave Arequipa the next morning on the bus to Cuzco, but there were many more fiestas awaiting. Inti Raymi!