Days 380-381: Lake Titicaca

Lake Titicaca is pretty famous for a number of reasons.  It is one of the largest (by some measurements, the largest) lakes in South America, and the highest navigable lake in the world.  It also boasts some pretty neat culture.

We got an early start with a bicycle-taxi race through Puno down to the harbor.  We were going to be doing home stays on one of the remote islands in the lake, and since they don't have much chance to get outside supplies we went shopping to buy a few things for our hosts.  A lot of this was cooking supplies like rice and condensed milk, but we also picked up a few small things for the kids.

The tour boats out onto the lake are almost entirely locally owned and operated.  There are no big tour companies, it's mostly just individual people who have saved up enough money to buy (or rent) their own boat.  Our boat was piloted by a young husband/wife team from one of the lake's many islands.

For awhile we just enjoyed the ride as we rode out deep into the lake.  The water is extremely blue, probably due to a combination of the depth and the elevation, and the surrounding land is a fringe of mountains.  Our first stop was at Taquile Island.  Taquile is especially known for its textiles, and walking up the path toward the village on the island there are people trying to sell you different sorts of clothes and jewelry.  One of the interesting things about the local people is that for them knitting is exclusively done by men, and weaving exclusively by women.  There are a lot of very colourful designs, and we discovered that each of the island communities had their own unique designs and special codes for them.  Men, for example, have bright striped hats, and the colours and arrangement of the stripes indicate where they are from and their marital status (among other things).  We had a nice open-air fresh seafood lunch on the island, and checked out a textile shop where all the different families could sell their clothing.

After leaving Taquile it was on to Amantani, which is where we were going to spend the night.  As we headed up towards the town we were met by the different families that were going to be hosting us for the night, and split up.  After a brief stop at our new homes to drop things off we headed to the center of town which is a sort of communal area.  "Town" is a bit of a stretch as a label as there's no real roads, and the buildings are just a loosely grouped patchwork of small farm plots and low buildings.

This one was my home for the night

Considering the mud brick nature of the community it was a bit startling to find a pretty state of the art (if small) soccer facility at the town center.  We got challenged to a game by some of the young men of the community, and after an intense match we ended in a 5-5 draw.  They weren't content with that though, so they challenged us to another, shorter game, which ended 2-2.  We decided to go sudden death to decide a final winner, and ultimately edged out the locals 3-2.

Afterwards some of the local boys brought some instruments over and we had a small concert / dance in the community center building.  It felt a bit forced, since it's obviously just a show they put on for the benefit of tourists, but it was interesting to hear what their music is like and dress up in some of the traditional garb.

My "little sister" for the day

Next we went back to give our little thank you gifts and have dinner with our host family.  There were 2 others from our larger group staying with the same family as me, and luckily one of them spoke enough Spanish for us to have a bit of a conversation over dinner with them.  We'd jokingly been referring to the couple hosting us as Papa and Mama, but came to discover that I was actually like 5 years older than my Papa.  They had 3 children, the eldest of which was 9 years old - a bit startling since the hosts were only about 24, but obviously in a small cut off community where everybody farms things work a little different.

There's no electricity, and because of the low numbers of livestock on the island most meals are vegetarian ones.  It was an early night, since it's hard to do much after dark in a place with no electricity.  A pretty intense hail storm hit randomly in the middle of the night which made sleeping a little hard since the roof above us was made of metal with nothing to insulate against the noise.

In the morning we had breakfast and headed out to help with some of the labor.  We learned later that many of the people from our groups were asked to do a little farming, but in our case we were taken down to the small dock and helped lug heavy bags of cement back up to the community.  Apparently in one of the households a teenager had gone out during the hail storm and collected a bucket of hailstones which was then used to make ice cream in the morning.

We had a bit more free time and the son of our little family took us on a walk around that part of the island so we could see a bit more.  We ran into a few others from our larger group getting a similar tour, and just wandered around together.

We said goodbye to our hosts and returned back down to our boat to visit one last stop in the lake.  Probably the most famous of the Titicaca islands is Uros, a community of around 50 floating islands.  The islands are constructed out of layers of reeds, and are generally centered around an extended family.  There are a couple islands with schools for small children, and reed rowboat "school buses" that ferry kids from the surrounding islands to school.  It's certainly a unique culture, but it's really dying out quickly these days.  The islands that are still there seem to largely survive off tourism now, and it sounded like many of the young adults go to Puno or other mainland cities to work, so it's likely just a matter of time until the community dies off.

It was now time to head back to Puno, and get on a bus to drive around the lake and out of Peru and into Bolivia.  The normal route was closed down by protests, but the slight detour didn't effect the trip much. After around a 4 hour ride we were pulling into La Paz, Bolivia, which would be the final country of my trip.

Days 364-369: Lima to Cusco

Things in South America started off a bit rough. By the time my flight got into Lima it was already dark out, and none of the ATMs in the airport accepted my credit card to get cash out. Since I knew I was going to be arriving late I'd booked a hostel for the first night near the airport, so after being unable to figure out any way to get money I decided to just walk from the airport to the place and try to figure it out there. I'd been warned by multiple people that Lima is one of those cities that you really need to be careful of as a tourist as there is a lot of crime, and walking with all my things through an industrial part of Lima late at night felt a little sketchy, but I didn't have any trouble. The hostel itself was well camoflaged and I had to buzz it to get somebody to come let me in. Luckily they were quite accomodating about the money and said I could pay when I checked out.

In the morning the hostel staff suggested where I might find an ATM that worked at a department/grocery store nearby. Walking around there were a few things that stood out. Over half the traffic on the street is taxis. There's no organized system of taxis, and no meters on them. Most people don't have cars, so they either take a scooter or take a taxi. People just negotiate a price before starting in, and if you don't like the price you just wave down the next taxi and negotiate with them instead. Another couple of observations were that all the buildings looked like they were unfinished. Most were either 2 or 3 stories tall, but all had exposed bars and walls for another floor on the top, but none had a roof. In my hostel the top "floor" had a few hammocks and a spot for table tennis on this exposed top floor, but a lot of them seemed to just be used to hang laundry, or abandoned entirely.
 

The part of town I was in was pretty run down, and other then the store I was walking to there were only a few barbershops and convenience stores that typically had the doorway barred so that you had to exchange goods and money through the bars without ever entering the shop. The store, when I got to it, was something like a Peruvian Walmart. The store itself had guards armed with rifles by the exits, but it was a pretty modern looking department store. I did find ATMs, one of which did give me money, so I headed back to the hostel to pay what I owed them. I'd booked another hostel in the nicer Miraflores District of Lima, and the guy at my hostel was nice enough to come out with me and haggle with a taxi to bring me there so that I didn't get ripped off. The taxi was running on fumes when I got in, and about halfway to my destination the taxi driver asked me to pay him so that he could get gas put in. This was strange enough that I got a bit suspicious, but I gave him the money and he got his gas and I got to my hostel safely. I guess they just do things a little differently in Lima.

After checking in I set about exploring Miraflores. It's a pretty nice area by the coast and has a lot more commercial buildings than where I'd been the previous night. It's anchored by a nice park full of feral cats, but also a hub for different events going on. While I was in Lima I came across a lot of music and dances going on, a few cultural events and some art and craft markets. One of the streets jutting off from the park is a popular shopping street for tourists that has numerous art, crafts, clothing, and souvenirs. If you head out towards the coast from the park you get to the coast, where there's a huge new shopping mall that's built right into the cliffside so that it's almost invisible until you're right above it. Some wings of it weren't even open yet (or were closed for renovation), but the shopping mall combined with the fancy hotels surrounding it were the most affluent part of Lima that I saw.

I'm not going to break everything down day by day, but here are some of the things I got up to in the few days I was in Lima.  I walked over to the Barranco District after a suggestion from one of the hostel staff. Wikipedia describes it as "the most romantic and bohemian" part of Lima, and it had a lot of nice old architecture.  I didn't really know where to go there, so I mostly just wandered, as is my style.

My ventures deeper into the city included a trip to the Larco Museum and visiting the historic city center. The Larco Museum is a private museum of pre-Columbian Peruvian art.  This is a culture/period that I really didn't know much about, so after all the European and Asian art and history it was interesting to get a taste of something completely different.

Like much of the nicer parts of the city the historic center is very European with narrow streets and ornate buildings.

During the taxi / bus rides around the city I spied some colourful looking art around an arena near the coast, so one of my days became a quest of following the coast north looking for this place without really knowing how far it was.  Almost the entire coast is just one park after another, so it's really quite a pleasant walk.  I did eventually find my goal, and I'll do a street art post on Lima next, but here are a few of the things I came across.  Discovering numerous parakeets just chilling in the park trees was especially nice, as you really realize just how tropical things are.

One of the major reasons for wanting to come to Peru was to do a specific hike, and said hike can only be booked in advance and through a group, so I had signed up for another tour for the rest of my time in Peru. I met up with them on my last night in Lima and we went out for a final Lima sea-food dinner before getting ready to fly into the mountains in the morning.

Days 359-360: Sidetrips and Leaving Las Vegas

My original plan when I decided to go to the United States for a few weeks included a few days spend at the Grand Canyon, ideally doing a hike across it. Unfortunately the didn't work out. Part of the problem was that I originally planned to spend about 3.5 weeks in the country, but changes to when I left New Zealand and when I booked a flight into South America meant that I only had about 2 weeks, so everything got condensed. The other issue was that about 3 months prior I tried to book a bed at the hotel at the base of the canyon, but it was already completely full. Basically it's just too hard to juggle planning for all the things I want to do, and a few things have to get left out.

Since I wasn't going to be able to do any real hiking at the Grand Canyon, my consolation was to do one of the day trips out of Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon. Most of the day was taken up driving there and back, but we did get in a quick visit at Hoover Dam, and around 2.5 hours at the Canyon. Our drive/guide talked for much of the time, and while he did have some interesting information and good anecdotes it was buried in hours of corny jokes and repetition that left me wanting to smash my head on the window repeatedly.


The Grand Canyon itself was pretty cool. I probably would have been a lot more awed by it a year ago, but the scope of it is still enough to impress me. I've found that for natural things I really react strongest when I can enjoy them on my own, isolated from other people, and that was simply impossible with the 2.5 hours we had. I had been hanging out with a German girl who was in my hostel in Las Vegas, and we took the shuttle bus around to a few of the different view points, but there wasn't enough time to get too far off the main paths so everywhere we went there were more tourists. It was still worth the trip out, and hopefully I'll get a chance to do the hike I want sometime in the future.


The bus got back pretty late in the evening, and I only got a few hours of sleep before I had to get up again around 3am to walk back down Freemont Street to the Greyhound station to get my bus from Las Vegas to Phoenix. I got a little sleep on the bus and spent the rest of the time enjoying the changing landscapes and got into Phoenix early in the afternoon. There are only 2 backpacking hostels in Phoenix, and one was only open for the 1st and 3rd days I'd be there, and the other only on the 2nd day, so I knew there would be a lot of moving back and forth. I checked into the first hostel and spent a bit of time exploring downtown, but mostly just relaxed at the hostel and tried to catch up on sleep.

Day 351: Crossing California

My morning was a bit rushed. I was taking a fairly early bus out of Los Angeles, using some small independent Vietnamese bus company that was going to pick me up in China Town. The main issue was that I had to have a printed copy of my ticket, which I had forgotten to do in advance, and I had to wait for the staff at the hostel to get up (they tend to party pretty hard, and normal office hours weren't until 11am), and then we had problems getting the printer to work. Once we finally got things working it was a pretty quick ride to China Town since it was on the same subway line as where my hostel was, so I managed to get there in time. The ride wasn't very good. The bus was cramped and completely filled, with only 5 people that weren't Asian.

We got into San Francisco in the late evening, and by the time I got to my hostel the sun was down. The hostel I stayed in was huge, and one of the few real organized hostels I've encountered in the US. It must have had a few hundred beds, and had other perks like a fully-equipped industrial kitchen, pool tables and even a small movie theater. It was right on the border of the nicer part of downtown and the much less nice Tenderloin district (you can't expect much from a district named Tenderloin) which was full of beggars and homeless. Since it was already evening by the time I settled in I only went out to get a pizza, and then spent the rest of the evening trying to plan out what to do in San Francisco.

Days 346-347: Waiting to Leave

I took my last bus ride of New Zealand from Taupo, back up through Rotorua and finally to Auckland. During our hike across Tongariro our group had a lengthy discussion on New Zealand meat pies, which seem to be something of a national dish. One of the places that came up was a little bakery in Rotorua that had delicious pies, so when I happened to have an hour between transferring buses around lunch in Rotorua I managed to hunt the place down and get a few award-winning pies.


I had purposely booked a hostel a bit closer to where the buses come and go, mostly so that I wouldn't have so far to work at the dreadfully early hour I had to go at to catch my plane when I finally left the city. I didn't really have much I wanted to do in Auckland, but I did hang out in the city for much of the second day, just browsing through comic and book shops and sitting around in parks or by the water. Although I booked 2 nights in my hostel, I ultimately only slept there once. My flight from Auckland to Los Angeles left around 7am, and between the few hours early I'd have to get to the airport, the bus to get there, and the walk from my hostel to the bus stop I'd have had to get up around 3am to do everything comfortably. Instead I just walked to a nearby park where I could use wifi (my hostel was charging $10 a day to use wifi - one of the things I really hate about New Zealand) and just spent the night reading a book on my tablet and planning out the next few weeks a little.

Days 339-340: Northward Blitz

It was now time to blitz back across New Zealand, or at least the south island. I first took a long bus ride from Queenstown up to Christchurch, delayed slightly be a huge herd of sheep that wouldn't get off the road.

I was curious to see what Christchurch would look like now, after it suffered so much destruction from the earthquakes. At first, it doesn't look that different, but then you start to notice all the empty lots and the fact that there really aren't many buildings more than 2 stories tall. The hostel was nice enough to come pick me up from downtown and drive me to the hostel, and the driver/owner was pointing out all the buildings that have been torn down, or are going to be torn down because the foundations are no longer safe.

The hostel itself was... interesting. Because there's been so much damage to the infrustructure there's a combination of not enough accomodations in town and a lot of people coming into the city looking for construction work, causing a huge shortage of beds. The hostel I was in had addressed this by having tents spread all through the backyard, with big outdoor communal areas under tarps. I was in a more traditional dorm room inside the house, but spent the evening hanging out with a lot of the campers. It had a very hippie commune vibe to it, and included lots of random drum circles and impromptu sing-a-longs.

My bus in the morning was at an annoying 7am, so I had to take a taxi from the hostel. About 2/3 of the way to Picton the bus came to a sputtering stop, and died. The driver tried a few things, but ultimately gave up and told us that they were looking for an alternative, but that anybody going to the ferry was going to miss it. I was mentally trying to figure out all the things I was going to have to shift, when one of the other passengers who happened to be a mechanic managed to get the bus going again. We rushed on north and I managed to catch the ferry and cross back over to Wellington. I just had time to get to my hostel, drop off my bags and have a quick shower before I met up with my childhood friend Alan and his girlfriend for dinner, as they happened to be heading down south as I was coming north. If you can't reconnect with old friends on the other side of the world, where can you?

Overall, a really long 2 days.

Day 336: Routeburn Falls to Lake Mackenzie

The second day was the longest hike, from Routeburn Falls up across the saddle between mountains, crossing from Mt. Aspiring National Park into Fjordlands National Park, around the back of the mountain range and down to Lake Mackenzie. The morning began with very poor visibility as we were right in the middle of the clouds. I was too restless to wait them out, but didn't want to miss the best views of the hike, so I walked slowly in the morning and took lots of breaks to sit and wait as long as I could manage before getting restless again. My delay did pay off as around 11am little pockets of blue appeared, and then within 15 minutes the entire sky was clear.


The next hour or so of hiking was my favourite of the track as you cross through another valley, and head up through another mountain pass that has a glacial lake nestled inside.


Past the lake, on the final saddly of the range was a little day-shelter that marks the switch from one park to the other. There's also a side trail that leads up to the peak of Conical Hill. Conical Hill only takes 30 or 40 minutes to go up, but it's a steep, hard climb. The view from the top lets you see in all directions though, so it was a worthwhile sidetrip.


The entire day so far had been above the tree-line, and that continued as the path crossed over to the other side of the mountains and hugged along the side. There was a new view of more mountains and a river valley down below, with forest between the alpine grasses around the path and the valley below.


Finally the path curved around the side of the mountains and revealed Lake Mackenzie down below. Then it was a series of cross-backs down the mountain that was hard on my knees. Towards the bottom the path went through an amazing mossy forest of silver beech trees that is nicknamed the "Fairy Glen". Unfortunately it's pretty impossible to capture it properly with my camera (like just about everything on this hike).


After grabbing a bunk (I was one of the first there, so I managed to get one of the good ones) I headed over to the lake for a swim. There was a group of Germans waffling over the temperature of the water, and I swear it took them all least 10 minutes to finally work up will to jump in after standing with the water up to their knees. I just walked down a log and jumped in, and while it was cold it wasn't that bad, and certainly not as bad as many places I've swam. Wussy Germans.

Each of the bunk houses has a park warden stationed at them. It's their job to look after the bunk house and check tickets, but more importantly they also maintain the track and look after the surrounding parks. The guy on our first night had just given us a talk on fire safety, but the one at Lake Mackenzie is something of a legend in the parks. He's worked at Lake Mackenzie for 20 years, and runs an annual Christmas dinner and Highland Games competition that brings the other park wardens in from all over the country. His talk was a mix of annecdotes, information and stand up comedy (for the most part absolutely deadpan) that was absolutely hilarious in addition to being very informative.