March 19, 2004
Copacabana, Bolivia!

Bolivia. 

It feels good to be here, I was nearly desperate to get out of peru after a seemingly endless convalescence in Lima and one delay after another getting the car fixed, etc.

I left Puno, a little town on the western shores of Lake Titicaca and spent the day circumnavigating the lake.  It's a big lake, big enough that residents and admirers have scratched their heads trying to think of appropriately big titles for it.  It's commonly referred to as "The highest navigable lake in the world", but as lonely planet points out their are other higher lakes that you can drive a boat across.  They suggest instead that perhaps it is the highest lake in the world with a scheduled boat service, and that certainly it is the highest lake over 2000 meters.  Certainly it must also have the distinction of being the one name in the world guaranteed to send english-speaking schoolchildren into fits of sniggers and giggles in geology class.

Other Titicaca highlights include

• Being bordered by both Peru and Bolivia. 

• Being the headquarters of the Bolivian Navy...  poor bolivia seems to be quite proud/humiliated about being nearly the only (apart from Uruguay) country in south america without a seaport.  they used to have one, they just lost it to Chile in a little tussle back in the 1880s is all.

• Being the birthplace of the #1 Inca chieftain, Manco Kapac!!!  Go Manco.

At any rate its a nice lake.

Before Yunguyo I hung a left and made the next 8 kilometers for the Bolivian border.  Another nice, painless border.  After central america I had become resigned to the fact that all border crossings were destined to be incredibly painful manifestations of bureaucratic malaise paired with proscribed acts of self-flaggelation--not to mention a real pain in the ass.  South America has been a pleasant surprise.  With the exception of extracting Jesse from the Colombian port, it has been a real breeze here.

After the sleepy Bolivian frontier, it was only several more klicks around the lake to Copacabana!  After appropriately impressing the local masses with an Indiana Jones-style entrance into this little burg (who am i fooling?) i swung by an Italian-Incan revival hotel on the water and booked a room for the night...   Copacabana being on the eastern shore of titicaca gets great sunsets by the way, and I was given the full treatment.

New friends were made... Julian, a solo German, and Simon and Chris, two british lads... brothers in fact, who are traveling south america and writing their account of a previous road trip through Russia last year.  we made fast friends.

You might ask... what are the first things one notices in a new country?  After all, its just a man-made border, and the people on both sides are largely the same.... so what changes?  A few observations: 

• new money... the boliviano.  worth about half the old peruvian sol.  while some coinage seems to mimic the peruvian standard, other innovations seem wholly bolivian... for instance the idenitical sizes of the 1 and 2 bolivian coins...

• cheap... bolivia is cheap, cheap, cheap. 

• new time zone.... bolivian time is one hour ahead of peru... or one hour ahead of Eastern Time in the US.  though i have been traveling for 7 months, i have always been "back home" at least with respect to time.  it feels a little odd to be waking up with the newfies...

• new accents... they do talk a little different here.  it's hard to pin down.  i guess it would be like a french person struggling to learn english trying to understand the difference between someone from north carolina and someone from texas.  one of my favorite things is hearing the occasional parody of different spanish dialects by locals...

• new newspaper... new political issues... everything centers around la paz now, the defacto capital of bolivia.

• and of course... most importantly... NEW BEER!  yes... goodbye Cusquena... hello Pilsner La Paz!  a well executed lager, a little mellower than the spirited Cusquena, but just as refreshing and just as satisfying after a long drive on a dusty hot day.