Transportation in Puno, Peru

We are now on our way back to Lima where we have to catch our plane at the end of the month. Our original plan was to travel by bus from Potosi in Bolivia directly to Arequipa in Peru with a stop in La Paz to catch another bus, which represents almost 24 hours of travelling. But one thing about buses in Peru and especially in Bolivia is that things rarely happen the way they were planned. For instance, if you buy your tickets from company ABC for the 8:00 o’clock bus you may easily end up on a bus operated by the company XWZ and leaving at 10:00 with a transfer in a city you can barely pronounce the name. If you’re lucky this bus will go to the same city you wanted at first. So there was no direct route from La Paz to Arequipa and we booked a bus with a transfer in the small town of Puno in Peru on the shore of Lake Titicaca. But even that route wouldn’t work as planned as it took longer than expected to cross the border and we missed our transfer in Puno. At this point we were very exhausted and instead of taking the evening bus we decided to spend the night in Puno and catch the next bus to Arequipa in the morning. The beauty of all this messed up system is that they are so used that nothing goes as planned that they can change your tickets or rearranged your route in no time and no cost. This is what I called the institutionalized disorganization in a previous post! We just learned to use it to our advantage ;-)

But the beauty of this hiccup is that it gave us the chance to see Puno since we didn’t stop here on our way south to Bolivia. Puno has peculiar means of transportation we didn’t see elsewhere in Peru or Bolivia and we didn’t want to miss the chance to try them. The first one is this modified motorcycle with the back wheel removed and replaced by the seating cabin and a double wheeled axel. I don’t know the name of it but I call it a Put Put and the feeling inside is quite interesting and hard to describe. Although the back axel is the width of the cabin and sitting on two wheels the whole structure is a quite unstable and swings from one side to other at every turn under the sound of Danielle’s laugh, who is having quite a fun, and the puff puff of the underpowered motor trying to get some speed in the busy small streets of Puno. It is like going on ride at the amusement park but in a pea can. To our amazement we made it alive to the restaurant after a 15 minute ride that felt like half an hour!

After a good meal and a bottle of wine it was time to come back to the hostel and for this we jumped in the second type of mean of transportation peculiar to Puno, the man powered three-wheeler! You probably saw these bicycles in a tourist area somewhere in your travel but here it is an actual public transportation device used by anybody. We thought we’d seen everything with the Put Put but this was before getting a ride in this! At least, in the other one we had the psychological feeling of protection offered by the thin can covering the motorcycle. But here nothing just the crash bars surrounding us as we went through the now busier streets of Puno. Also it is good to remember that Puno is at about 4000m (13000ft) of altitude so for the poor driver this is not a lot of air to breath! For us, let’s say that the thin air combined with the exhaustion made the bottle of wine we drank during dinner hit our brain like an 8lb mace! Now Danielle is having a real good time and if you know Danielle you probably know her laugh, which is completely contagious to everyone around. Those pictures show the driver to be very serious but this is not how things were during the ride. He was laughing as well as the pedestrians and the passengers of this other tricycle which passed us on this three lane boulevard while Danielle was mimicking a race between us and them! Even though we were not going very fast, at every bump we had the feeling of being ejected out of our seats. This was a great ride and we sure recommend it to anyone visiting Puno.

A piece of the life in Bolivia

We spent less than two weeks in Bolivia and during that short period of time we saw many interesting things we’d like to share with you. Of course in such a short period of time we cannot claim to know how people live and think in Bolivia and what we present here is just a thin slice of the much larger and richer Bolivian society. This first picture speaks for itself; people here are clearly very religious and this shows not only in the many churches we see everywhere but also in the taxis, the stores or the Internet cafes where religious signs can be seen everywhere.
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This lady wears a very typical dress that can be seen not only in the country but also in the middle of the city as show on this picture. Another interesting aspect we noticed is that women are the ones usually carrying stuff when walking in couples using these colorful blankets on their back. Very often babies are carried using this technique. Talking about men and women there is one thing we never explained but saw very often. In the restaurants, waitresses would mainly if not solely talk to Danielle even though in most cases I managed my way in Spanish a bit better than her. The girl would hear me and note what I say but would not look or answer back at me!


People in Bolivia are not the wealthiest on earth and in order to build their buildings they need to use very cost effective building materials. The most common way of building walls we saw, especially in the country, is using these bricks made of dirt and straw. Unless my memory is failing me they are using the same technique the Egyptians used about two thousand years ago to make their bricks. In some occasions we were able to see inside through an open door and what you see outside is what you see inside. Interior finish and matching paint color exist only on TV here!

One of the main activities we have in this trip is to travel by bus between cities. Here you can see the main bus terminal in the city of La Paz. The transportation market in Bolivia, and in Peru as a matter of fact, is so developed that literally tens of companies compete for a share of the cake. They are gathered in these large terminals where you can hear the employees yelling the destinations offered by their employer. Sometime, a customer entering the terminal would get surrounded by ‘representatives’ of many companies offering their services at the same time!

Distances between the cities can be long and in many cases the roads are not even paved hence limiting the speed of the buses. We privileged travelling at night as most of the trips would last about 10 hours and cost about $5.00 per person.

We took that picture at the border between Bolivia and Peru. These peoples were sorting the broken eggs out of the trays and we assume that the eggs were destined to the Peruvian market on the other side of the fence. We never saw so many egss at once.

On our way from Copacabana to La Paz we had an interesting experience. The bus needed to cross one of the legs of Lake Titicaca and to do that they first asked all the passengers to leave the bus and take one of the many boat shuttles that pass the people from one side to the other. However, with our very limited Spanish all we could hear from him was about this ‘’Blah, bla terio es barque bla bla’’ we just couldn’t understand what he was telling us and he quickly gave up and simply left us on the bus for the crossing. The bus then got on one of these small barges powered by only a 50HP outboard engine. Thank God there was no wind that day otherwise we would have ended up in the middle of the lake!

This one really struck us. This little boy in the door of the bus is not a passenger but works on the bus by standing there and yelling the different destinations of the bus to attract the customers. This picture was taken in the middle of the morning when kids are definitively supposed to be at school and of course he was not the only one we saw. But don’t get us wrong here; we saw tons of kids walking down the streets at the end of the afternoon in school uniforms. Apparently, this is just not for everyone!

People are definitively amazing in Bolivia but it is not possible to travel in this country and not being struck by the beauty of its landscape. It is beautiful and it is high; most of the regions we visited in Bolivia were over 4000m (13,000 feet) and at this altitude only climbing a stair makes you breath heavily.

A Salt Lake and the mines of Potosi.

A must see in Bolivia is the great Salar of Uyuni. This is the largest salt lake in the world and apparently covers over 7000 Km2. The place was simply amazing as we drove for over an hour through the never ending plane white surface of the desert. I don’t quite know how this place was created but this is not snow you see but real salt! Some locals living close to the salar actually are still harvesting the salt. We left to the salar from the little village of Uyuni in a 4X4 truck for the tour. The funny thing is that the salar itself is very flat and any car would be able to drive through. The 4X4 was, in my mind, more to get out of Uyuni where the roads are so bad that they can even compete with the roads in Montreal!



Close to the other end of the Salar we stopped at one of the “islands” that sit just there in the middle of the salt. This one in particular is a national park where we could see those amazing cactuses, which some were over 1000 years old. From the top of the island we had a splendid view of the immensity of the salar.

Then we travelled to the town of Potosi well known for its mining activity. For centuries this was the largest silver reserve in the world and the Spanish took everything. Today, the self employed miners are only extracting zinc. The custom is for visitors of the mines to bring some gifts to the miners for a value of about 20.00 bols (1 bol = $0.14). The thing is to buy stuff they need for their day to day operations namely drinks, cigarettes, coca leafs with catalysts, alcohol or dynamite. Yes I said dynamite! You see, dynamite is sold freely on the streets of Potosi so for 15.00 bols ($2.14) we were able to buy one stick of dynamite, a detonator, a 4 seconds fuse and a bag of Ammonium Nitrate to increase the power of the blast. Hey, when in your life do you have the chance to buy dynamite??? We couldn’t pass that one. We also bought a large bottle of soft drink for 5.00 bols.

This is the entrance of the mine we visited and on the second picture you can see a miner pushing his wagon used to carry the mineral. When fully loaded this wagon will weigh about 1000Kg (2200lbs) and is pushed by 3 men. If you think you are a man and that the office environment is a harsh one, you need to talk to these guys you wimp! And this brings me to talk about the gift item I listed above as “coca leafs and catalysts” that you likely didn’t get completely. The coca leaf is widely grown in Peru and Bolivia and represents large revenues for the farmers. Of course you are thinking about the export of cocaine made out of the leaf, which is sure a good part of the revenues from the leaf but definitively not the main one. The coca leaf on itself is very harmless and when infused in hot water it basically has the pharmaceutical effect of the caffeine from tea or coffee and this is how the famous “mate de coca” is made. Just a simple tea made of coca leafs, which is pretty good by the way. To obtain cocaine apparently the leaf must be combined with a catalyst and an electrolyte, which are also freely sold in the streets of Potosi! The miners don’t really eat during their 12 hours working days but they always have a big chunk of coca leafs in one of their cheek and suck the juice out of them for a few hours. Mixed with the catalyst and their saliva playing the role of electrolyte they can go on without feeling pain, fatigue of hunger for the entire day!

When you spend your life in a shithole with no education you necessarily become very superstitious. Here is Tio (I hope the spelling is right) the god of the mines. Once a week the miners will gather in front of him for a special ceremonial. They offer Tio two cigarettes they put and lit in his mouth then coca leafs in his hands and on his head and finally some 96% alcohol on him and especially on his penis that you can see in erection between his legs. The rational here is very simple Tio has a wife; Patchamama who is the goddess of the earth and everything surrounding us. By putting pure alcohol on Tio’s stick the miners hope that when Tio go make love with Patchamama he will fertilize the earth with pure mineral. How come we nerve thought of something like that???

This miner here is presently digging the mineral out of the zinc vein he’s exploring. The day before he blasted this section of the gallery but the blast was not very good and he didn’t get much mineral out of it. He was actually very pleased when I gave him the dynamite stick, the detonator and the fuse because he had to blast again the next day. Knowing that a blast requires about 6 or 7 sticks of dynamite this means a blast cost roughly 100 bols ($14.00) but a miner makes about 50 bols ($7.00) per day and he has to pay for his own equipment! Again, you really think you have a miserable life? If we had known what we were going to see down there this is 10 sticks of dynamite we would have bought not one! Remember that the zinc those guys extract end up in our screws, our electrical wires and in the soldering use in every single electronic devices we use. With a life expectancy of 45 years these guys spend their lives in a hole so we can watch our TV, play our videogames and talk on our cell phones. You really think that the $2.00 dynamite stick we gave him was enough for what he does in return?

Arrived in Bolivia

We arrived in Bolivia on October 6th, 2009 after a 9 hour bus ride from Cuzco to the small village of Copacabana sitting on the shore of Lake Titicaca.

Ah! Finally the one and only Machu Picchu!

When we think of Egypt we think of the pyramids. When we think of Peru this is the lost Inca city of Machu Picchu that comes to mind. Well, lost until found again at the beginning of the last century and becomes now the main Peruvian tourist attraction. But before we tell you what Machu Picchu is today, let’s dream a little bit with these postal card pictures of this great Inca city lost for centuries on the top of a hill part the much larger mountain of Machu Picchu.

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Who hasn’t dreamed of putting his backpack on and start walking in the virgin jungle of Peru to reach this legendary Inca city that was thought to be the last Inca city where the last Incas retrieved with all their riches after the invasion of conquistadors? Well no gold or any kind of treasure was found in that city but by its geographical location it was left unspoiled for probably for over three centuries and we can now still see the stone walls that were put in place with rudimental tools and untouched during all those years. You see, all other Inca sites in Peru are either half destroyed by the Spanish or disassembled by locals who needed the stones for newer buildings. Machu Picchu is how it was when abandoned by the Incas and the reason is still a mystery. The agricultural zone, the residential area and the temples can now be visited by adventurers who dare entering the lost city. Ok, let’s not push it too far. The city when found a century ago was all covered by trees and bushes but the entire site has been cleaned up by the Peruvians and the site, protected by the UNESCO, can be walked as long as we respect the assigned paths and areas. As we got there very early in the morning, we saw the sun rising over the mountain range and spread its yellow light on the stone walls sitting peacefully on the ledges of the deep canyon lying below the great city.

Ok, you’ve dream enough now? Then let’s get back to some kind of reality regarding Machu Picchu. The lost city of Peru is visited every year by about 450,000 visitors and on some days it can be as much as 2000 visitors from all over the world making Machu Picchu the largest tourist site in Peru. Don’t get me wrong though, it is a really nice place to visit and is worth the travel. However, if you think you’ll end up in the middle of jungle with a guide to find the place you’ll be highly disappointed. Also, this is not cheap! The entrance to the site may be $50.00 per person but to get there and all the side expenses you’ll have to spend close to $200.00 per person if you’re careful. If you’re a bit looser you can always rent a room at the hotel that is built directly at the entrance of the site on old ruins and that cost only $2500.00 per night! Do the math and you’ll realize that the site brings easily over $100 millions to Peru every year in direct expenses and probably way more in indirect spending. Peru is poor and this is a hell a lot of money for them so you can imagine that they made everything they could to get as many tourists as they can up there and suck as much money out of their pockets as they can. This unfortunately takes a bit of the magic out of the experience!

For some reasons the government hasn’t build a road to get to Machu Picchu and there are a few options to get there. One is to take a 4 day trek along the 40 Km long famous Inca Trail through the mountains as long as you reserve your place three months in advance. Our legs not being in their Olympic shape of our early 20’s we did like almost everyone else and took a 2 hour train ride from the town of Ollantaytambo to the village of Aguas Calientes located at the bottom of Machu Picchu. The train is operated by Peru Rail who has the monopoly of the only path leading to Aguas Calientes. Kitching!!For the deeper wallets, you can buy a train ticket for $450.00 US dollars and they serve champagne during the 4 hour ride to Aguas Calientes but directly from Cuzco this time. For the entire Machu Picchu trip we got all our tickets booked by the other owner in Cuzco (not the ride with champagne of course) but the agency he uses for that was celebrating their 40th anniversary and everyone got drunk that day! As you can imagine, once we got in Aguas Calientes at 10:30pm the guide of the agency wasn’t there with our tickets and the hotel we had a room booked had no idea who we were. But don’t worry everything got sorted out and we got a room to sleep the 4 hours that we had left before leaving for Machu Picchu the next morning.

The Inca city of Machu Picchu is located at 7 Km from Aguas Calientes on the way up! At this point you can climb you way up but again, what most people do is they pay $7.00 and get on one of the 10 buses or so that shuttle between the town and the entrance of the site every 10 minutes. On the second picture you can see the path followed by the busses, this ride on itself is an interesting experience!
The pictures you saw at the beginning were taken around 6am when the herd of tourists was not arrived yet. At 11am the site is swamped by visitors and taking a clean picture of the site is virtually impossible. We got there very early in order to be able to get the pass to climb to Wayna Picchu; the steep hill you see behind Machu Picchu. The pass is given only to the first 400 visitors arriving on the site and they are all gone minutes after the opening of the site. Finally, we never went because we were not feeling very well that day. You see, the food in all the Inca Valley from Cuzco to Machu Picchu is terrible and our stomachs were just not happy. Nevertheless, this is a place that has to be seen and we are happy that did it.
One last note, to go back to Cuzco the guide told us to go to a certain restaurant to get our train tickets and so we did. To our surprise the tickets were there! Of course the seats were split apart but hey, don’t ask too much especially when you’re paying the big price. The train took us from Aguas Calientes to Ollantaytambo where a company called “Bus Lucy” was supposed to wait for us with a sign and bring us back to Cuzco. At this point you guessed it already; Bus Lucy was there indeed but had never heard about us. But the most amazing thing is that everyone we dealt with didn’t seem surprised at all by all this and would take us in at no charge and would just sort this out later between themselves. This is what I call institutionalized disorganizations!

The sacred valley of the Incas.

Before getting to Machupicchu one needs to first visit the sacred valley of the Incas. Basically, a set of archeological sites featuring old sites from the Inca’s era that were not totally destroyed by the Spanish conquistadors. Along the way we sometimes meet the icon of these regions of South America; the lama. However, this could be an alpaca for what I know as they are hard to tell apart for tourists like us! We don’t know what a Lama, rarer, tastes like but the alpaca is quite good.

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Not the most visited site in Peru is the “Los Salinas”. This is an incredible set of about 2000 ponds built before the Incas, according to our guide, and used to harvest the salt that comes out of the mountain as a small salty stream. We tasted the water source to remind us the ocean water but to our surprise it tasted way saltier than the sea water if that’s possible! Would you believe that about 350 families still live of harvesting this salt today?

Out of the small town of Pisac are these Inca ruins of a small Inca’s administrative village. Behind me you can see the stone that was used to sacrifice animals for religious and superstitious purposes. Nope, not human sacrifices here that we know of. Human sacrifices were very rare in the Inca’s empire and only used when the Gods were really mad as in the case of the mommy Juanita that was offered to appease the volcano god and who we had to chance to see still frozen in Arequipa. Sorry no pictures were allowed.

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This is the set of Inca terraces of Murray that were used for the agriculture in the mountains. This round structure is pretty unique but the terraces are definitively not, as they can be found at every Inca site and are now widely used by the farmers all over the mountains still today.

This one is unfortunately more for our French readers since the word “Quipu” in French is pronounced exactly as “qui pue” and means “that stinks”. So this sign basically announces the Pizzeria that stinks! We don’t know what kind of cheese they use in their pizzas but this is really not inviting ;-)

Not for the fainted hearts.

Roger and I went for lunch in a restaurant that sure looked quite clean called “El Inka De Oro” in Cuzco. In fact it was cleaner than many restaurants we went so far. We saw at the door that they had a hamburger special for only 7 soles that includes the hamburger, a fries and a cola. Remember that 1 sol = $0.33 so it is a $2.33 meal. We enter and order the lunch special. After being served I taste a fries, no bad at all. Roger, him chose instead to taste the burger first and takes a large bite, not bad at all. I then attack my burger as well. Yummy; a large bite. I start chewing when Roger yells “FU%^ $@, WHAT’S THAT???’’ Then with the mouth full I ask him. “What’s up, what’s up, tell me what’s up!!!!” He points at his plate and with horror I see this little maggot covered with mustard and ketchup, which had just felt from his hamburger, crawling quickly to hide under another fries. Instinctively I just spit my good huge bite in my plate and run to the washroom to rinse my mouth, yark yark yark!!!! I come back to the dining room and Roger asks me if I have all my things. I answer yes then he takes his plate and puts it on the counter where the waitress is and shows her the worm. She starts to talk quickly in Spanish and we don’t understand anything. We then just quickly turn back and leave with disgust in our face.

The next day we left to buy our train tickets for the visit of Machupicchu but Roger’s digesting system is working very hard and he’s not feeling well. I leave him sleeping but at 11:00am I tell him that we really have to go because the train station closes at noon. He gets up but still doesn’t feel well and we decide to take a cab. We arrive at the station to be told that they don’t sell tickets at this station anymore and we have to go to the other station. Roger doesn’t feel well at all. He’s white and sits to recover some strength. I run to the other side of the street to buy him an orange, he eats it and then feels a bit better. We then decide to return to the hotel but on our way we stop to drink a fresh pressed juice. This is then that Roger almost passed out. He’s white like a pint of milk and the people from the restaurant start to help us and call an ambulance. We end up in a clinic specialized in illness associated to high altitude. They branch Roger on a saline solution and he spend the day sleeping and rehydrating. The doctor’s verdict; dehydration + drop of potassium in the body, which is necessary for the muscle function, + lack of oxygen. Result; no strength left to walk and rapid drop of the blood pressure. After spending the day and a good part of the evening at the clinic to get rehydrated we left for the hotel. The day after, no way we go to a restaurant for dinner! We instead prepare an all banal meal but with the cleanness completely under our control ;-)