La Paz to Cuzco 15th-17th Feb

Wed 15th
Today we did a lot of wandering around La Paz, agian trying to avoid foam and water that now seemed to be flying with less accuracy due to the fact that many were on there 3rd or 4th day of drinking. It had rained hard last night so the streets smelt slightly nicer! However, there was still a lot of blessings going on, this involves scattering petals around a building to be blessed, applying a liberal amount of pure alcohol and then setting off fire crackers - very nerve wracking for those who have not noticed that it is going to happen (like me - I don't think I've ever had so many shocks in one day!)
The streets were lined with people selling their goods, some had blue plastic coverings over fairly large amounts of carnival goods such as costumes, streamers, tins of foam, alcohol and masks; others were simply a cloth laid out on the floor with piles of petals separated by colours; then there are the little wheeled carts with sweets and cigarettes and finally people wandering around with their goods offering them to all who passed. It is a scene of colour, noise and confusion!
We were looking for some paintings; the typical Andean painting of women in local costume sitting around in their bowler hats, we had fallen in love with some in our hotel room but they wouldn't sell them to us!! We wandered for hours and found a few artists in their little back workshops but no paintings in the style that we wanted, it was very frustrating because we could sometimes see them through windows but many of the shops were closed for the carnival.

Our wanderings allowed us to explore all the cobbled back alleys though, past the shops selling llama foetuses and lucky charms (we bought one for travellers and one for health), through a maze of little shops selling alpaca wool goods (we bought some warm bed socks) and through squares full of drunk revellers with imposing colonial churches with intricate carved facades towering above. We also managed to make our way to the terminal terrestre (bus station) to buy tickets to Puno for tomorrow.
Finally we returned exhauseted (by the altitude and by the fact that you had to keep on swerving to avoid people (who never get out of the way here), or ducking flying foam or jets of water) and started packing up for our return journey to Puno in Peru.

Thursday 16th
Up at 6:45; our bus was supposed to leave at 7:30 but we finally left at around 8am with our bags on the roof under another ill fitting tarp! The journey out of La Paz involves a circuit around the city as the road gradually climbs higher and higher until at the highest point just when the bus is able to pick up speed you hit the city of Alta (High), which is also celebrating Carnival, and we spent another hour creeping along its main street through a throng of minibuses (the public transport) that stop anywhere and everywhere to drop off or pick up passengers and goods, avoiding people carrying impossibly enormous bundles of goods and police who blow there whistles at all the drivers but don't really achieve any control! Once out of the cities and onto the altiplano we finally managed to make a bit of ground and then along the edge of Lake Titicaca, over the ferry again, enough time to buy choclo y queso (maize and cheese) and then on to Copacabana.
I sat next to a Belgian girl who had spent 6 months in La Paz as part of her Psychology degree working in an orphanage, she had started a program for the volunteers who work there to follow to stimulate the babies and toddlers; apparently they get so little attention that their speech is delayed by 1 to 2 years by the time they are 5 making them even more disadvantaged than their orphan status alone. Tears welled in her eyes as she talked about some of the kids, what heart wrenching work.
In Copacabana we had to change to a Peruvian bus, our driver told us that we needed to be back at the bus at 1pm so that he could load our bags and we could leave by 1:30. (We spent the hour that we had looking for paintings in the local shops and found a couple of small prints, not exactly what we wanted but the best we had found.) We should have known that we were working on South American time; all the passengers were back at the bus at 1pm but there was no sign of the driver; then at about 1:15pm he appeared but he wouldn't let us board until about 1:25pm so we had all been standing around in the heat and were all a bit flustered as we got on and were given customs and border crossing papers to fill out. We left at around 1:45 and wound around the lakeside for 8km to the border crossing as we tried to fill out all the forms.
The border crossing went smoothly; we bid our fairwells to Bolivia; and then we all piled back into the bus and after another 2.5 hours of winding around Lake Titicaca, with fantastic views across the lake to one side and mountains and plains to the other, we arrived in Puno. We made our way back to the hotel where we had left our car and luggage and lay in the cool of our room for about an hour until our hunger drove us out again in search of sustenance.

Friday 17th
We left Puno at 9am to make the journey across the altiplano to Cuzco; it was probably the most beautiful journey we have made in Peru and so nice to be back in the car where we can stop when we want to gaze or take photos. Green plains with mountains rising on either side, animals tethered or wandering with carers and adobe and thatch homesteads dotted the landscape. People, bent under huge bundles of grass that they had gathered, walked along the edge of the road, taking the fodder back to their animals (probably guinea pigs or sheep). We followed the path of a red river along wide valleys (it is so flat that the meanders are huge) and the land was green, so green; such a contrast to all the desert and the dry grasslands we have seen in the rest of Peru. The Inca had chosen their capital city's location well, the valley was so fertile and even had terrraces up the hillsides and some right on the top of the highest mountaintops that we could see! As we drove along the river it suddenly became apparent that this was one of the rivers that had caused so much destruction in the recent rains; some fields were completely flooded, the crops ruined; the train track that we had been following had been cleared of mud and then we came upon a completely devestated village with the ruins of adobe houses still sitting in about a foot of water. The people here work so hard for what they have and then this happens.
We passed some impressive Inca walls (a fort that we will come back and have a look at), and then rose slightly away from the river and into Cusco. We found a hostel with a car park and then went out for a wander and some food. We found an impressive church, built on the foundations of an Inca building with the amazingly cut stones (that no one can reproduce!), women and children in local costume and the main square (an impressive sight with huge imposing churches on 2 sides and covered walkways on the other) as it got dark. The Spanish, once they had toppled most of the Inca buildings used the foundations and lower walls as a base to their own buildings constructed on top. This means that some of the streets are still as wide, and have the same layout as they were in the Inca times. It is really apparent how long lasting the Inca stone work is, with the crumbling colonial era masonry and plaster above.
We visited a few travel agents to gauge the mood about getting to Macchu Picchu. It seems that we will have to return another time as it is officially closed until April, but we got some ideas for other places to visit and we will explore those further tomorrow.