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La Paz, Bolivia- It’s been weeks since my last post. I skipped through Lima, stopping only long enough to catch a night bus out. It´s smoggy and dirty and surrounded by endless slums built on lifeless desert sand and grit. I didn’t stop to visit the more upscale areas, which I´m sure would have given a different impression. But what I saw on the way in and out was enough. It’s the inverse of most American cities, where the wealthy suburbs sprawl out from an often impoverished core. In Lima, the wealth is concentrated in a few exclusive areas and the poverty just spreads out in all directions forever.
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I didn´t like it. So I headed back up into the mountains. Such a contrast. It could only be an act of desperation that would drive so many campesinos from the almost idyllic Andean hillsides to the harsh life (it seems to me) of the Lima “suburbs”. I spent several days working my way through central Peru on local buses crawling over gutted roads, sometimes 10-15 hours a day, just to travel a few hundred kilometers. I felt like I was seeing Peruvian life as it is. No tours, nothing packaged or presented, very few gringos. … and then I landed in Cusco.
But I’m out of time on this drunk snail of an internet connection here in my hostel in La Paz. I have to get up at 5am to ride a mountain bike along “the worlds most dangerous road” in the mountains above La Paz, and then I´m heading off to the jungle for several days. As luck would have it, about a dozen young hip backpackers in the hostel have just decided to have a big party right outside my door. God grant my earplugs strength.
So Cusco will have to wait. And Machu Picchu. And Lake Titicaca and the Island of the Sun. Each of which deserve a full post in themselves. It has been an amazing couple of weeks. And now I`m off for another week of adventure. It´s a big commitment to try to keep up the travelogue. Each post can take hours, depending on the connection and the number of pictures I put up. But I will try to dedicate a day to writing when I return to La Paz in a week. The stories are worth telling.
There are many new pictures in the Peru section of Photos- including the sunrise over Machu Picchu.
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