Lake Titty & Bolivia

After recovering from our Inca adventure, we headed to the highest navigable lake in the world...but more importantly the lake that has titty and kaka in its name. hehe.

At the Peru end of the lake, it was extremely touristy, with not much to do except go on one of the touristy tours - so we did. We got taken out to the ¨floating islands of Uros¨. These are supposed to be amazing islands made of reeds that people still live on in the traditional ways. Instead, they were more like floating souvenir shops with actors who dress up in the traditional gears while we are there, but get changed when they go to town.

They also have these awesome reed boats. But these are for tourists, they use motorised
dinghies. At least Jacky made a friend on our boat trip. But then he sung and asked for money - he was pretty smart cos he had a captive audience.


That night, roadkill was on the menu. Ainsley and Jill decided to try the traditional peruvian ¨cuy¨. Which is your favourite pet guinea pig, whole, looking like it was peeled off the road.


From there it was time to head to Bolivia - which involved a first land border crossing for some members of Team Fantasia! We headed for Copa-Copacabana (sing it everyone!), which was a much nicer more relaxed end of the lake.

In Copacabana we ventured out to another island (where we just had to walk up more stairs.....we hate stairs.....), then we did a lovely walk around the lake (but we are starting to hate walking....). We were lucky enough to be there for their annual Festival of the Virgen Candaleria. This is supposed to be a religious festival, but as far as we could see it was a massive booze up with Bolivian crates, together with a massive costume competition and an even bigger dance off. These are a few of our favourite things!!

Not long after this came the worst night of our lives. We had been told the bus trip from La Paz to Uyuni was bad, but we could never have imagined how bad it really was. We´ll just give you a brief summary:

• the stench that was with us from the outset, probably attributable to the amount of locals on board. Bolivians smell. As do their kittens and dogs that were also on board. This was not assisted by the fact the windows were taped up.
• the fact that many locals are happy to take a 9 hour overnight bus in the aisle. This gives those with seats butts in their faces and/or general touching (see point 1).
• the roads. After about 2 hours, we ventured onto what we thought was some roadworks. It turned out this continued for the rest of the trip - imagine driving at high speed over uneven cattlestops, slowing only to cross rivers. And we were supposed to sleep? It was like being on a vibratrain.
• The drugraid. Even if we had managed to sleep, we would´ve woken up when the scary looking cops came on board for a long time, looking for drugs. Their sophisticated method involved poking bags (not ours of course!)
• The arrival. At about 4.30, we arrived in our destination. But we didn´t know this, we thought we were at our second toilet stop. Eventually we worked it out and got off, but there isnt much to do in Uyuni on a good day let alone at 5 in the morning.

Bus trip aside, from Uyuni we launched into a 3 day jeep tour of the salt plains and general sights of Southern Bolivia. The scenery was incredible. The first day was on this Mahoooosive salt lake, which pretty much looks like snow as far as the eye can see - but its hot! It also provides the opportunity for hours of trying to take tricky photos using the fact that there is no depth perception with all that white...Pictures say a thousand words.....

Of course being mature grown ups, we couldn´t help ourselves. Here we have, Jane pooing Ainsley, Ainsley spewing Jacky and the rebirth of Jacky (via Ainsley´s......)

After fun with salt, we saw an array of scenery, flora and fauna. There were flamengos, wild llamas, foxes, ostriches, red lakes, green lakes, volcanoes and a desert that looked like a painting of Salvador Dali (apparently).

It was an amazing trip, and worth the fact that 9 of us, spent about 8 billable hours a day in this jeep.... And no, we didn´t kill each other. But we did send the Oldies home after this trip.

Congratulations if you made it this far through this entry, we got a bit carried away with our photos (you should see the bad ones).

This was the end of an era for Team Fantasia, as Angie, Lyndsay and Jill headed home to NZ and Aussie respectively. It was awesome to have an extended Team Fantasia - and a sad goodbye at the Santiago airport. Thanks Mums, Aunties/Pretend Mums - it was so cool to have you here on the trip and you did pretty good for old people! Any more visitors welcome!