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 315-316: King's Cross

I took the train back to Sydney and switched lines to go to the King's Cross area, where my new hostel was. King's Cross is the sleazy part of Sydney with all the bars and strip clubs. It seems to be full of borderline homeless people, junkies and has by far the highest ratio of people who talk to themselves of any place I can remember staying. Despite all that, it was still a fairly nice hostel and the area feels perfectly safe. It just has...lots of character. There's lots of cheap restaurants around, and the fact that I'd already spent quite a bit of time exploring Syndey combined with my ordeal from Katoomba meant that I was happy to just stay close by the hostel and not really venture too far out. The rain was also still a constant issue. It would be clear for a few hours, then it would pour for 40 minutes, then clear up quickly again. It was infrequent enough that you could still go out in the dry periods, but I don't think it went more than a few hours without rain over the two days.

Days 309-311: Return of the Rain

While the rain wasn't constant, it was definitely regular, especially the first day. I spent a lot of the day in the hostel reading and using the internet. I had one trip out to China Town for lunch that ended up with me getting soaked, but by the evening the rain had died down enough that I ventured out with one of the girls in my room to try to find a place to each and watch the Australian Open men's final. Everywhere we went they either weren't playing it, or were playing it without volume. We found one place that had it in, but didn't serve food. We had a couple of beer there, then decided to hop over to McDonalds to grab food quickly between sets. Coincidentally they were actually playing the game in McDonalds, and we got talking to a few other people watching the game and ended up spending the next 2 hours watching tennis in McDonalds while eating 30 cent ice cream cones.

The next day I ventured out into a few of the Sydney districts further from the harbor. There was a small art gallery/shop in Surrey Hills that was my main focus for going to that area, but there were lots of the out of the way independent shops, restaurants and little bits of art that I enjoy so much.

From Surrey Hills I walked over to Newtown, which is another area that had been recommended to me. I didn't really know where to go though, and the main street of the area wasn't as interesting for me as Surrey Hills had been. I did find a burrito shop which had the best burritos I've had since leaving Canada, so it was still worth the trip over. In the evening the hostel had an activity out to a bar where you got a free drink and fries if you went. I have a hard time turning down free things, so I braved another period of pouring rain to go out. The free fries was actually massive plates of both fries and potato wedges. I didn't really stay out much beyond the food and drink, but Australia is so expensive that anything free helps.

I spent a lot of the next day in the hostel planning things and talking to the new round of people going through. One was having a birthday, and we decided to prepare a dinner of vegetables, rice and kangaroo steaks from the grocery store. We went out for drinks afterwards, but I didn't stay out too late since I had a train to catch in the morning.

Days 293: Brunswick & Smith

I'd spent a lot of my first couple of days in Melbourne wandering around the main rectangle of the city center, and felt it was time to venture to a different part of the city. Another of my Melbourne friends had recommended a particular part of the city, Fitzroy, around Smith Street and Brunswick Street (as well as many, many other suggestions) as being a particularily cultural part of the city full of interesting little shops, galleries, restaurants and bars. Not surprisingly this artistic and cultural influence also caused it to be another area full of street art. I didn't have a map figured out for this part, but there was enough around that it didn't require too much effort to find lots of art and I'm sure I missed huge amounts of it.

I don't really have too much else to say about the day. It was the first day of any real heat in Melbourne, but it was still a nice day to be out. I'm going to save most of the art for the next post summarizing all the street art, but here's one of the more iconic pieces of the area - the Fitzroy Everfresh mural.

Day 289: A Day in Malacca

I got to the city of Malacca (or Melaka) late in the morning and did my usual stubborn habit of walking from the bus station the few kilometers to my hostel. Malacca was made into a UNESCO site jointly with Georgetown, and they both have that architectural and cultural mix of a complicated colonial past. Malacca grew from a Malay fishing village to a major trading city for the Chinese before being captured and passing hands between the Portugese, Dutch, British and Japanese. Since I only had the single afternoon to explore the city I skipped having a nap despite being pretty exhausted by this point, and headed out to explore the city.

The central river though town that passed near the hostel was lined with buildings painted in colourful murals, mostly showing off aspects of local culture and history.

I followed the river down to the town center which contains a cluster of buildings that make up the local museum. The museum was quite varied and had a lot in it, but most of the information was just describing what things were, and there wasn't much historical / narrative information to really put any of it context.

Finally I walked back towards the hostel down Jonker Street. It's the major shopping street that has a lot of antique and artsy shops, and I had a good time browsing through things. I bought a new t-shirt and a pair of Thai fisherman pants to supplement my constantly evolving wardrobe.

Day 286: Single's Night

We decided we didn't really want to do anything too involved on the island, and we began the morning by opening the door, taking the 3 steps to the lake and jumping in for a swim. In the little cottage rooms above and beside us were 4 young Finnish men who were hanging out and swimming around, and we chatted with them for awhile.

After drying off we walked around the loop on the peninsula that makes up Tuk-Tuk, looking for food and for a place to use wifi since our guest house had none. Periodically through the day we'd see young men dressed up in suits with ties and elaborate plumed hats and sashes on, and by talking with a few of them we learned that there was a big festival going on in town in the evenings. Apparently once every 5 years all the young single men and women (and their families, and people just looking to party) from all the neighboring villages come for a festival/dance, basically to try to hook up with a prospective spouses. This sounded too culturally weird/awesome to pass up, so in the evening we met up for dinner with our Finnish friends (they had been on the island quite a bit longer, and took us to a much better restaurant than the earlier ones we'd had), then followed the sound of music through the city and the road away from the buildings of the town.

It was made pretty clear to us that we weren't to dance, and we sat to the side with what was presumably family members and well-wishers. Since none of what was going on was in english it was a bit hard to follow at times, but there was an MC who would walk around talking, and then the band would break out into the song. I say -the- song because there was only one. By the end of two days of this festival I got quite tired of it. I don't really understand why they have a large band to play the exact same traditional song over and over and over. They should just tape it and save some money next time. Anyway, once the music was going the two groups (male and female) would start dancing and slowly approach each other, dance a bit, then break back apart to their seperate groups when the music stopped. This happened over and over, and I guess eventually some prospectives paired up. In the next phase, All these matched pairs lined up facing a group of family members in an opposing line, and there was a sort of weird tug-of-war dance where one side would force the other side backwards, then they would reverse. All the singles who failed to meet anybody got to stand around feeling left out.

Afterwards the dance broke into more of a free-for-all (still the same song). A few of the Finns stuck around but most of us headed back to our sheds for the night.

Day 282: Bat Cave and a New Year

I got up early in the morning for my trek only to be disappointed by learning it was being postponed a day. According to the planner it was because other tourists had chickened out because of the rain through the night, but I also suspect the guide was eager to stay in town and party for New Year's. I was a bit bummed, since it meant I'd have to stay in town for New Year's as well, and it would probably force me to cut out something else I wanted to do in Sumatra, but I was mostly just making everything up as I went anyway, so I wasn't too heartbroken.

Since I suddenly had a free day I started looking for alternative things to do, and was intrigued when I learned about a fairly extensive cave in the jungle. I ended up going with an incredibly awkward middle-aged Swiss man (more on him later). The organizer for our trek tried to convince us to take a guide, but he was telling us it would be about $10 each, which was ridiculous. $10 doesn't sound like much by our normal standards, but in Indonesia I've generally been able to get accomodations and all my meals for a day for $10, and services are even cheaper. Instead we went on our own, and near the cave met a local man who offered to show us the cave for a much more reasonable $1.50 each. [As an aside, I'm converting to familiar currency for your sake. $10 CDN is roughly 100,000 Indonesian Rupiah. Despite the nice clean conversion, I've had a bit of trouble with the currency because of how many decimal places are involved, and how many bills there are. The only coins in Indonesia are 100 and 500 rupiah, but for bills they have 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000, 20000, 50000, 100000. Having common bills of 1000,10000 and 100000 means that you're always having to double check exactly how much you're giving over. It's also the only country I've ever been to where I'm regularily inconvencieng people by making them try to break the equivelant of a $10 bill.]

I was very pleasantly surprised with the cave. It's totally undeveloped and getting through it requires climbing, crawling, and quite a bit of maneuvering and balance. It's a mix of total darkness you need flashlights to navigate and holes in the ceiling opening up to jungle and sky. The variety of the caves was a lot of fun, and while it wasn't a terribly hard workout for me, poor Peter (my Swiss companion) was covered in sweat and bruises by the time we exited.

After lunch I explored Bukit Lawang. The town is spread along both banks of the river with 3 plank foot bridges connecting the two sides. It's very touristy, but still manages to have some personality. One feature I found particularily funny was a guy that squatted down at the side of the path playing the watch-carefully-and-guess-what-cup-the-pea-is-under game. A crowd would stand around him and people would throw their money down on their pick, and then he'd turn up the cups and pay off any that guessed right. As far as I can remember, it's the only time I've ever actually seen somebody running that game in real life, and he seemed to be there consistently from morning to late evening every night I was there. Another major attraction in the town is tubing down the river. Foreign tourists often combine tubing from deep in the jungle as part of their trekking, but there were far more domestic tourists who were in town for the holidays and they would just set up along the river and spend the day picnicing and playing in the water, much like how we'd go out to the beach for the day.

I had dinner on the hostel's patio and spent the evening talking to an American volunteering in the area and some Europeans who were now living in Indonesia. My entire time in the country I'd been pretty surprised at how flirty and forward the girls were (in a few days I'd accumulated a small collection of phone numbers I could do nothing with and requests for my facebook/email address) and these middle-aged English and German men and their considerably younger Indonesian wives reinforced my suspicion that if I was ever desperately in need of a wife, Indonesia could probably provide me one in a hurry. A lot of the younger crowd in town set up bonfires along the river, and around 11:00 people started shooting off fireworks. Fireworks in Bukit Lawang was a bit worrisome. It felt a bit like the spiritual equivelant of lighting a stick of dynamite and tossing it into the air. It wasn't -quite- that extreme, but only just. The fireworks were about the same grade as you see in the big city-organized displays, only this was locals along the river shooting them off. They were often at quite low angles so they exploded close to buildings and jungle, and a lot of the people were just holding the fireworks as they launched them, which made me cringe. In the end, they made it to 2013 with nobody getting hurt and nothing burned down, and the effect of dozens of big fireworks being launched all up and down the river had an impressive effect.

Days 280-281: In and Out of Medan

As I said before, Medan isn't much of a tourist destination. The only real sights are a mix of temples, churches and mosques, and while at times these can be quite interesting, I wasn't really in the mood, especially after months of seeing similar things all over Asia. Instead I spent my time just walking around the city. I continued to do a lot of talking with locals, including flirtatious street food vendors, curious tuk tuk drivers and college students wanting to interview for school (4 different groups of them). I eventually got lost enough in the maze of streets that I had to get a tuk tuk ride back, but at least it was fairly inexpensive.

On my third day in Medan I stayed pretty close to the hostel. In the afternoon I was picked up by a tourist van going from Medan to Bukit Lawang, and spent the rest of the day on the road. Bukit Lawang is a small town along the Bahorok River right next to Gunung Leuser National Park. Bukit Lawang itself is almost entirely built to cater to both domestic and international tourists, and most people go there to trek in the park, particularily looking for wild orangutans. I got there in the evening after dark with the intention of heading into the jungle the next morning on a 2-day trek

Day 279: Medan

I had an early flight from Kuala Lumpur over to Northern Sumatra early this morning. The flight left around 7:30am, and it the bus ride to get to the airport is an hour, so I had to leave quite early to get to there with enough time to feel comfortable. I was flying out of the LCCT, which is the low-cost budget airline terminal, and you can definitely see where the low cost part comes in. Things were pretty disorganized and checking-in/dropping off bags was a massive free-for-all of people pushing towards the front without much of a queuing system. Luckily I came with time to spare and managed to get through everything without any of the frantic scrambling I try very hard to avoid.

Medan itself isn't much of a tourist destination, but it's the biggest city in the center of quite a few interesting things in North Sumatra part of Indonesia. It's one of those rare cities where the airport is actually near the city center, and I just avoided the swarm of taxis and tuk-tuks and just walked from the airport to my hostel and fortunately he extra weight of the stuff I bought in KL was barely noticeable. It was still early when I got to the hostel and my room wasn't ready, so I left my bags and went off on a lengthy walk without a map or any knowledge of the city at all.

Medan is a bit rough around the edges. It reminds me a bit of some of the more sane cities in India. It's hard to go a few minutes on foot without somebody trying to get you into their tuk-tuk or on the back of their motorbike, as if the only reason you were walking around has to be that nobody else has bothered to offer you a ride yet. I was obviously something of a rarity. All the old men sitting in front of shops would call out and wave to me, and lots of people came up to talk to me. Even though it does get a bit tiring when you can't just have a little peace, I much prefer the ones who just come up and want to talk out of curiousity to the ones always trying to offer you things. At least here people are pretty accepting when you just say no or shake your head, and don't hound after you. The streets all look virtually identical, full of squat little random shops and apartments. I can't think of a single building I saw with more than 3 floors, or a single recognizable brand name other than one McDonalds I came across.

My McDonalds anecdote deserves special mention. After walking around all morning after an early morning flight I was pretty hot and exhausted, so I went into the McDonalds with the intention of buying an ice cream. At the counter they told me there was no ice cream, so I left. I instead bought a cold drink from a shop outside and just sat on the patio in the shade relaxing. About 10 minutes later, a group of 4 Muslim girls who had been in the McDonalds came out with a bag of food. They, having seen but not heard my exchange at the counter thought that I hadn't had enough money, and when they saw me sitting outside had bought a meal for me. I was pretty embarassed, because obviously I do have money - probably a good deal more than they do, and I tried to explain the situation, but they insisted I keep the meal (I suppose there wasn't much else they could do with the food). I should have offered to pay them for it, but I didn't think of it at the time, and in a way I feel it might have cheapened their gesture. Instead, the only gesture I can offer is to mention this story and hopefully help out somebody in genuine need of a meal later in my travels. In the "western world" there's unfortunately a lot of negative feelings towards Muslims these days, but the fact that these girls were so willing to do something like that for a random stranger deserves special consideration.

I finally made it back to the hostel around noon and checked in. There's no AC and no windows, which means the one outlet in the room has to be for the fan when I'm in the room, which makes charging / using my tablet a bit of a problem. My plans in Indonesia are somewhat off the beaten trail, so it's very possible I'll have trouble keeping in touch for the next 10 days. If I stop posting things, don't worry - odds are I won't be dead.

Days 275-276: Merry Christmas from KL!

First of all, Happy Holidays to everybody! "Christmas" is different things for different people, and I hope that even those who aren't into the religion bits, or into the consumerism bits at least manage to take a bit of a break to enjoy friends and family.

My bus ride from Tanah Rata to Kuala Lumpur was faster than I thought, only taking about 4 hours. My hostel was within walking distance, but it was a solid walk (although not as gruelling as the one in Panang). The hostel I'm staying in was picked for its proximity to KL Central Station, which wasn't a factor coming in, but will be a factor when I leave since my flight to Indonesia is very early and the only night buses to the airport are from KL Central (see, I actually plan some of these things out, sometimes!) In addition to a good location for me, the hostel is also very cool. It's run by a group of young people who are all into the arts in some manner, and into the youth culture and activism. All the walls and floors have murals or other artwork on them, and they use the common space to put on different art/music/dance/theater shows. After getting to the hostel and checking in I basically just retraced my steps back to where I got off the bus, checking out all of the interesting things I'd seen on my walk down that I wasn't able to stop and explore because of all my bags.

The first of these stops was at a canal / reservoir I had to cross. Both sides of the canal were covered with lovely street art murals, and I've since learned that it is really the focal point of street art in the city. I walked the length of the painted sections of the canal admiring the art before climbing back to stree level and continuing on.

I also visited the Central Market, which is a building full of shops focused on Malaysian art and culture. A few parts were neat, but I found a lot of it to be just more gift shop like places selling the same cheap stuff you find everywhere else, only more concentrated. I also visited the nearby Petaling Street, which is the central hub of KL Chinatown. It's a long pedestrian market street similar in feel to the markets in Hong Kong and Taipei.

After a good sleep today was my day to really explore Kuala Lumpur. I wasn't sure how much Christmas would alter the. The signs of it were certainly present, but not like you'd fine in North America (for one thing, everything was open). The big shopping malls all had Christmas displays out, and I came across a group singing carols in one mall, but the malls didn't seem unusually crowded. The people working at food stalls and in convience stores all wished me a merry Christmas, but that could just because I'm western.

I found a very cool shopping mall called parkamaya that had a definite Japanese flavour to it (it's the one with the purple trees above). It had cosplaying mall girls handing out flyers and all the walls were posted with anime/manga figures. One of the shops had legitimate anime for sale at ridiculously low prices that I just couldn't pass up. In the end I spend about $35 CDN for what would have cost me over $400 to buy at home. It's going to be a bit of a pain to carry it around for the next 4 months, especially since I can't watch any of it on my tablet, but I didn't go as crazy as I could have, so I'm sure I'll manage. After that I swung by the famous Petronas Towers. After visiting most of the famous cities of the world a few more towers aren't all that impressive, but there was a park nearby that was a nice place to take a rest and enjoy the day. I suspect the weather at home doesn't allow for quite the same sort of outdoor recreation.

The collection of unique towers in Kuala Lumpur makes it pretty easy to keep track of where you are when travelling on foot, although the roads tend to wind and cross over each other a lot. On my way back towards the hostel area I angled by the even taller KL Tower.

Back at the hostel I was treated with some of the other guests to a Christmas dinner prepared by one of the hostel co-owners and her girlfriend. We had spaghetti, chicken, potatoes, salad and corn, along with a mix of desserts. Not quite the traditional Christmas dinners of Canada, but the food was good and the gesture very much appreciated!