Holiday

Not much and the holiday is over, but one never knows what can might occur in the last minutes.

There were so many things that I am pretty sure that thousands of them will stay barried in the back of my memory and only very seldom in certain siutuation I´ll remember them.

Since we left home and got the apartment fluded because snow melting, we thought that was the most agitated day of our holiday. As you are probably guessing-that was not the case. Princess had a harder time than that.

Once we landed in Lima and paid 30$ for the taxi to the hotel we got lucky with the owner helping us organize the tours in Peru. I am sure it was way more expensive than just being on our own, but we didn't feel like haging around without knowing what to do. Here we got sun burned really bad. But besides it was cool to fnd out it never rains in Lima. (I had to make to here to know that).

I am definetly not going to describe all the details now, my only intention for the moment is to enumerate some main experiences and come back later on them, with pictures and what it takes.

The Ballestas Islands were nice and stinky and taking the boat felt like in a carussel. Sea lions and pinguins and birds of different kinds everywhere. The candelabre in the sand.

Sand boarding was intersting, and the buggy tour in the desert, especially that we found out they cap-size fr5om time to time. Sunset in the desert and the winery tour after which I got dizzy and happy.

One of the thingds about these countries (Peru and Bolivia) is that people don't paint the houses on the outside, entire cities and vilages look like their not finished.

At Nazca lines, after the plane trip over them, we shared a room with some swedish guys for kipping our luggage until we leave, but while we and them were away someone stole whole their money. And we felt rather guilty because there was a note for us in the door, that they left for lunch.

Seeing condors at the colca canyon and having hot springs in the rain was cool. prince and princess had altitude sickness, but they eventualy got over it.

Arequipa was nice I guess, I felt to tired and bad to enjoy, and the fact that the bolivian consulate didn;t exist anymore because the consul died and they didn't replaced him did not help(we wanted visas for Bolivia).
In Puno, at Titikaka lake we took this tour and the guide made all kind of "funny" jokes like: the lake titikaka is at the highest altitude of it's kind in the world , but in South America there is another one higher in Venezuela. He would keep repeating that in English and Spanish and laugh in both languages.

Floating islands and Quechua people and Aymara people - which only make sense to me now.

And the real adventure only starts in Bolivia. BTW the flag from Arequipa consulate as brought to Puno, and they overwritten on it :P.
We wanted to meet some friends in south Bolivia, after a 16 hours tour from La Paz, but the trip only took 31 hours in the end and the second bus had a flat tire, it stuck in the mud, almost falling aside, the driver did not care about a lady beig left behind at one af the 15 minuters stops(her luggage was still in the bus), the bolivian music was loud.

Finnally we got there and that day was a fine one, starting the 4 days tour everyting turned even more diabolic. We slept overnight in some rooms with no furniture nor anything else bus 5 stone beds and a leaking roof and cold and hell, next day one of the cars broke and we had to enjoy that room for another half a day as it was strongly raining. we left but the sweepers didn't work and I have no clue how the driver, Manuel, found he's was(sometime he would get he's head out of the window driving like this) as I couldn't see anyhing, on one side there was abrupt mountain , on the other a deep valley, and the car, 4X4 though it was slipping. The next day we had an accident in the funcking middle of the desert with another car, where you can barely meet any car ... hmmm, but there it was, we met it.

the Salty Lakes were fluded and a lot of things to see were hidden in clouds - we did see most of them in the end, but by the end of the trip Bogdan had his cell phone stolen (or he had just lost it). All this time there was not signmal for the phone anyway :).

In Potosi, the miner's town, it was cold like hell again. When getting to Sucre, not only we find out about the strike and being stuck , but also our flight from Madrid to Bucharest was cancelled.

Finally we are on the way to La Paz, Copacabana, a 19 hours trip by bus, and there's this lunatic guy, singin all the time and fixing us with his eyes, screaming we need passports because we're in his countru and he's in love and school is more important than work and he'll kill the president.

In Copacabana is rather cold and no sun bathing for me still, only the face and arms as a true farmer.

There are way to many missing things, like this guy shaving himself on the street, in Lima....