Reported by Marick Payton

Copacabana: Gateway to Peru

Once across the lake we had a great ride up over a small mountain (whose base was at over 12,000 feet, of course) and down into the lovely little lakeside town of Copacabana. This is just the sort of road upon which I enjoyed canyon racing with Carolina Mike. Mike is a very successful club racer so these “races” were mostly me just trying to keep up. At this altitude, however, his Transalp was loading up too badly to make a run of it, despite his furious paddling, so, relishing my opportunity, I blew by him The town square of Copacabana is dominated by the most remarkable Moorish-style Church, all white stucco with a huge, brilliantly tiled mineret-like archway. I saw nothing like it anywhere else in South America. I made my second tourist purchase in Copacabana, picking up a beautiful woven jacket for $15. No doubt I could have gotten it for less but it hardly seemed right to haggle with such poor people over such cheap prices.

Buying things in South America, particularly in small town Bolivia and Peru–be it meals, lodging, or goods–was a somewhat frustrating experience for us, unacustomed as we are to waiting patiently for a sales persont leisurely to conclude some other, often personal, business. It was frequently remarked that these people desperately needed some serious, character-building competition to teach them a proper respect for the importance of good organization and customer service. While I appreciate good customer service as much as anyone, I think, I was ambivalent about this prescription. I remember hearing it made, yet again, just the morning after a dinnertime conversation in which we recounted all the folks we knew, including some of us, who started getting tension headaches on Sunday in anticipation of a return to frustrating and/or high stress jobs on Monday. I suspect this is a very uncommon phenomenon in Bolivia and Peru. Given that this desultory approach to doing business is part of the broader cultural world of these people, I was intrigued by the questions of what might be done within it to engender a more service-oriented approach without creating a society that depends on antiacids and tranquilizers to maintain its acid and emotional balance. I never came up with any good answers, for all my musing. Eventually the irresistable tide of economic globalization will force some answers, for better or worse, I suppose. There is surely an opportunity for we of the first world to learn, as well as teach. I hope we take it.

Getting through Peruvian customs was relatively straight forward but quite time consuming. Then it was a short ride into Puno. The change from Bolivia to Peru was absolutely remarkable. The little towns were suddenly full of industry. Stucco brick manufacture seem to be going on everywhere. The houses and farm yards were bigger and better kept. There were more and more-modern motorized vehicles. Murals extolling the virtues of immunizing children and other good health practices were frequent. Needless to say, these striking changes were all culturally and politically induced as the natural environment itself hadn’t changed at a bit.

Our hotel, the Ferrocarril (iron horse), was at the train station at the far end of town. Getting there was an adventure of itself. We found ourselves in a sea of humanity constantly flowing this way and that. Puno is a rather funky town, by tourist standards, but wonderfully full of life. Upon reaching our hotel, we had to ride up over an eight inch step into and through the hotel lobby to reach the small interior courtyard in which we could safely park the bikes.

The high point of our lay-over day in Puno was a boat ride to Los Uros, the “floating islands.” These “islands” are really just large rafts woven out of the reeds from the lake, large enough to hold small communities of half a dozen reed houses. As the reeds rot from the bottom of the island the villagers build them up on the top. The islanders also make boats out of these reeds. Thor Hyardahl is said to have copied their construction for one of his transoceanic adventures. In earlier days these people lived off fishing. Today the tourist trade provides their livelihood. On the island we shopped for souvenir weavings and other crafts. Some of us opted for a canoe ride from one island to another. For me, getting to see such a unique and creative way of life was one of the high points of the Inca Expedition. On a much more prosaic note, it was also great to have fish as a menu option. I dined on lake trout almost exclusively for the next week.

Our first full day in Cuzco we enjoyed a really great ride out to the famous marketplace at Pisac and the Inca ruins in Ollantaytambo and Urubamba. The market was huge and intensely colorful, full of handicraft stalls of every sort, a large fresh vegetable vendor area and a bakery making delicious Indian-style calizones. There were also many opportunities, for a very modest donation, to take pictures of exceedingly picturesque children and old women, many adding to their photogenic appeal by carrying baby animals of various sorts. I scored another jacket and sweater, seriously stretching my carrying capacity, and later, at the ruins, bought a little doll from a beautiful but very touchingly sad-eyed little girl. On the way to the ruins we stopped for lunch, at a Best Western Hotel, of all places, the first and last I saw on the whole trip. While we were dining on an excellent buffet, an Andean band played a heady combination of the local music interspersed with some Beattles and Simon and Garfunkle. Hearing the “Sounds of Silence” in such a wonderful setting brought tears to my old eyes. The spirited “race” home through the mountains with Helge, Kyle and Carolina Mike provided a exhilarating end to a wonderful day. On the way back we stopped at an isolated farm house to find an old woman whom Helge had photographed a year earlier so he could give her a copy of the picture he had taken. I marveled that he could remember this particular spot in the road in such a long journey.

Machu Picchu


Home