The Road to Lake Titicaca
Added on Monday, April 26th, 2010 by Carole Nash Editor
The Road to Lake Titicaca
The road out of the hotel was clogged up with the cars and minibuses and for two blocks I crawled, unable to squeeze through extremely tight gaps. Because I had a small hole in the top of my radiator, coolant and water began to steam and drip on my forks. In order to stop the temperature rising to a critical situation I had to keep switching the engine off. By constantly restarting the bike, the battery began to fade and the temperature continued to rise. The traffic continued to jam. La Paz was second only to Delhi in India for the worst traffic conditions I have ever experienced. Legions of minibuses stop-started for journeys so slow you could have been a beetle and got to your destination quicker. Once down on the main city centre thoroughfare – the Prada – traffic speed improved until suddenly, the main ‘autopista’ out of town appeared and astonishingly, within 10 minutes I had exited the city. Looking behind, La Paz looked like I imagine the inside of a termite’s nest to be.
The road out of the city wound through small settlements sitting in fields. After an hour or so, these fields began to slope down to Lake Titicaca. These sapphire blue waters form the largest high altitude body of water in the world. Rectangular nets sit in the calm waters waiting in the warm sunshine to catch trout, which along with potatoes and rice, is the staple food. Small fishing boats are testament to a thriving local industry. Groups of colourfully dressed women sit in cleared spaces in the reeds eating platefuls of cooked beans and maize.
After their food and high on the alto-plano, women and men are bent double, digging up potatoes. Dirty sheep and small dogs wondered across the road. Old women with their bowler hats perched on their heads, shouldered loads you wouldn’t give a donkey, yet in the countryside they trudged, miles from any obvious signs of habitation.
At the tiny port of Tiquinia, simple wooden craft await their cargo. The little ferry crossing was charming. The boats are really an outboard engine bolted onto a pontoon of loose planks and it is only here across this 600-metre strait, that an income can be created for the villages on both sides. Sitting on this pontoon reminded me of all the short ferry crossings I’d undertaken. The trip across the Nile to Dongola came to mind. As we bobbed on the water I lay on the planks and slept. My floor moved and turned gently, the warming wood smelt of drying dust. It felt good to have such small ships timbers twist underneath my body as I drifted across the Strait of Tiquinia on Lake Titicaca.
Beside the small port of disembarkation was a comedor, and inside, large bottomed Bolivian women were selling fried trout, rice and black potatoes. They reminded me of those children’s toys, so broad was their base that whenever you pushed them over they always returned to a standing position. The road from here was superb. Large sweeping bends rose and fell astride an isthmus of hills crossing two sides of the lake.
Our hotel was at Copacabana, the most important Catholic pilgrimage site in the country and home of the revered image of the Virgen de Copacabana. The beautifully dressed statue looks over an untidy collection of red tiled roofs and concrete houses. The Virgen shows up in many places, in fact it’s extraordinary how many places she is known to have been seen. To accompany the possibility of a spiritual experience, the hotel had sweeping views of the lake and when the sun sat on the horizon, it looked like a fiery hole to heaven. In the large lounge area, big gentle sofas allowed us to rest. Some of us wrote our postcards, some their diaries whilst some just sat, and I am sure marvelled at what they saw. Small boats sat softly as all colour was drained from the day.
Later that evening, hands wrapped around brandies in the lounge area of Hotel Gloria. Graham Willett remarked on him being so privileged to be here, riding his bike. Jonny Johansson was seated opposite Tim Hughston who was next to John Baggaley, all reminiscing about great rides they had experienced. I suddenly felt nostalgic for these chaps, these people who had worked hard all of their lives on such a tough journey. For some it would be their last big hard ride, for others a door was opening, but I had a duty to help them make this the journey they dreamed of.
After breakfast it was to our delight that we were still on the shores of Lake Titicaca. After our usual small preparations we rode out of Copacabana. Rob was suffering from altitude sickness, so he took time out in the back up whilst Erik rode his bike. Out here, all the names increasingly sounded exotic, perhaps because they were so familiar: mystical Inca ruins, Sun Gods, Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca herself. These places were names straight from a gazetteer. Such sounds of places are read by every schoolboy. Pictures of Uros Indians living on their floating reed islands were surely packed in every young persons satchel. Tales of explorers and conquistadores, stories of great endeavours never to happen again. As a youth my favourite shop in London was the map shop, Stanfords on Long Acre. It still is.
Five miles out of Copacabana, we reached the Bolivian border post. It was an easy exit whilst entering Peru necessitating each rider enjoying a brief interview with a customs officer behind barred windows. Joe from Bahrain had been in for an hour and Alex Wong from Borneo was next out. Jokes about KY jelly and men with rubber gloves were as predictable as they were distasteful but everyone laughed as Alex adjusted his trousers. Perhaps compared with the way his grand mother used to shrink heads, a thorough examination of his paperwork really counted for nothing. A couple of other bikers arrived, a few hippies in baggy pants, but beside the money-changers and the tuk-tuk drivers, all was calm. Patrick Bullimore wanted a Costa Coffee so I reminded him that you could take the man out of the urban but not the other way round. Come to think of it, a hot latte and a crisply ironed copy of the Times would go down a treat.
Some of the riders hadn’t got the precise paperwork for Peru so a gift of 20 soles, about £4, was suggested as a way for the official to close his eyes to such minor discrepancies. “Robbin’ bastard,” said Richard, and quickly I suggested a change of mindset be the order of the moment. One could be refused entry into Peru thereby forcing us to ride back to La Paz to source out an appropriate agent to sell us the paperwork that we lacked. ‘Please, not La Paz again, pass me the lubricant,’ he said, immediately getting the message.
“Quite,” said Erik, “when you look at the sky be careful it doesn’t spit.”
“What?” said Richard. I stepped in, suggesting to Erik that this was an obscure Argentine saying, and he agreed that it’s meaning might be lost in translation. Instead he turned to one of three newly arrived Latino bikers and talked without drawing breath for nearly an hour.
Still we waited. Every fifteen minutes another rider was released by chief customs officer Sr Remigio to ride to Cuzco. I was eight riders and two hours away from such a privilege.
For a while I slept in the sun dreaming of home. For me the beauty of being away is the pleasure I feel knowing I can return home. Yet the converse applies. I long for the wetness of Wales and the dull sky. I cry out for the mediocrity of home life but rapidly despise it the longer I am there.
I started to chat to one of Erik’s motorcycle compatriots, a man from Buenos Aires. We were world travellers and I judged that life was larger than a conversation about Las Malvinas. I said that Argentina had so many resources and that fifty years ago it was the twelve richest country in the world, and once it was thought would compete with the United States in terms of economic wealth. “You see,” he said, “we Argentinians are complicated people, we choose a government and each one they are corrupt. The fact is I do not have an answer. I think we are masochists!” and laughed. Such is life on the road, such snatched conversations. Then it’s my turn on the naughty chair. Because of previous visits my bike details are already in the aduanas computer so my documentation is completed faster.
