High on a desert plain...

...where the streets have no name...

Or in the case of Cusco, too many.

Previously on Buffy...

Our intrepid viajeros had just arrived in La Paz. One had died from soroche, the other had od´d on cable.

But by the next morning I felt great, so we decided to do the walking tour mentioned in the good old Lonely Planet. Found a really old church, went inside, it looked amazing, but people were actually praying and stuff...so we left quick smart.

After a bit of wandering around, we discovered the part of La Paz we were staying in could be broken up into sections. There was soccer shirt street, toenail clipper lane, stationary alley, jeans quarter, and a whole hardware block. The streets all have actual names like Santa Cruz and San Pedro - sounds musical but I guess in Spanish it's about as imaginative as 42nd street.

We had been going mostly downhill at that point...altitude? Pfft! What were those Brazilian footballers whinging about. Then we went uphill.

After ten steps we had a rest.

Easy, really.

Then...shopping. Mucho silver jewellry, alpaca stuff, Che t-shirts. I bought a charango, muy cool.

K decided she just had to go to the Bolivian version of Wagamama, so we headed off down the hill and found ourselves in the sort of CBD. Flash hotels, government offices.

Happily, after our 45 minute walk, the restaurant was closed. And we had to walk back...uphill.

Eventually we got back, found a place for dinner, went to bed.

Next day was more of a sightseeing day, but k managed to find time to buy stuff anyway.

Early the next morning we got up and walked to the bus station and caught the bus to Puno. Not a bad trip, apart from the annoying group of French people on the bus. Another land border, sort of. We had to walk across a bridge from the Bolivian side to the Peruvian side - across Lake Titicaca, which was suitably impressive.

Puno at first seemed really quite crappy, but we found a place to stay. It seemed ok, notwithstanding the knock on the door from the French people (different ones, but they're everywhere) in the room next door that asked if we heard who had stolen all their stuff. K figured that if they'd been ripped off we were safe, and I tended to agree, but we still made sure we carried our important stuff around.

We looked around a bit, and it turns out Puno is quite the tourist town. Dinner was great - I had fillet of Alpaca, k had soup. We picked the place because they were playin old school trance - and just after we ordered, the 2 hour set from the 10 member Andean music band started. It included random dance acts, shrieking girls, blokes with jangly pants, the whole shebang. We bought a CD as we left when the set had finished. I'll burn y'all a copy.

I'll leave it here, and see you in a bit.

We´re off on the Inca trail tomorrow for 4 days.

Oh, and mangoman, your manager should be jealous, she'd love it.

And you really do need a bit of Spanish.

Chao.