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Charles Smith’s Journal Entry for Tuesday, June 24…
The adventure thickens!!
Beautiful sunny day! Up at 5:00 a.m., breakfast at 6:00, on the bus at 7:00. The hotel staff had to raise the steel shutters at the entrance for us to leave the lobby. Miguel (our fountain of information), an Aymara dudian who had proudly shown us his PreColumbian heritage yesterday at Tiwanaku, was as pleased that we were ready to go “en punto.”
About an hour out of La Paz on the only road to Lake Titicaca, we came upon numerous buses and vehicles along the side of the road and blocking the way. I hopped out with my camera thinking I may have something to photograph. I heard a muffled boom in the distance and walked about 200 yards toward the gathering of people, where our guide was finding out what was going on. The local miners were upset that absentee mine owners were stopping the labor. The miners asked the government for some relief, but since no help was forthcoming, they decided to strike. They came down to the roadway, blocking the road with stones, and threw sticks of dynamite behind any vehicle brave enough to run their gauntlet. Miguel laid out our options, and said in his inimitable lilt, “The decision is yours – my concern is only for your lives.” All knew that discretion is the better part of valor, so we aborted that trip to see the sights. Miguel ingeniously offered an alternative plan, so we went west toward Puerto Perez over about 10 miles of road unimproved and under construction. In Puerto Perez, on Lake Titicaca, we cumshawed a homemade boat with two 55hp OMC engines – no life jackets for the 10 of us, but no worries. We took the hour boat ride to Ostrich Island. There we saw an exhibit of reed boats that Thor Heyerdahl had commissioned for his Pacific odyssey in “Kon-Tiki.” The Aymara that built these reed boats was a native of this island. We also walked across to the other side, so we could see Peru, which starts at the water’s edge.
Well, the return boat trip was about an hour and a half. We had lunch of trout and other fish from the lake at about 2:00 in Puerto Perez. My appetite was gone, and looking back, I had a combination of a bad cold, insidious altitude sickness, and fatigue. The bus ride back to La Paz was rewarded with a stop for those who needed to do more shopping for native goods. It was a quick trip to Burger King, then off to bed before another very early morning.