Bolivia: great first impressions

I've moved on to Bolivia, and so far I love it. Bolivia is one of South America's poorest countries, ranking only above the Guianas in its GNP, and the poverty shows. Yet Bolivia is a country of immense richness and diversity. It is one of the world's top eight most biodiverse countries, contains some of the world's highest and most spectacular mountains, shares one of the world's most impressive lakes (Lake Titicaca) with Peru, contains vast swathes of Amazon rainforest, is home to one of the world's largest salt flats and best of all has some of the world's best evidence of the dinosaurs' existence: dinosaur footprints! It is a country that offers so much to the people that come and visit it, yet very few well-off people from North America and Europe do come as tourists. Until a few decades ago, the only foreign visitors to Bolivia were mountaineers, utilizing the country's spectacular cordilleras. Let me demonstrate to you how cool this country is.







Where do you think these photos have been taken? The mountain picture, perhaps, is a view across to the Alps from some pristine mountain lake in Italy? And perhaps the images of ruins sitting above an idyllic beach and the sheltered cove were taken on a luxurious and inexplicably tourist-free Greek island? Wrong. They were both taken from virtually the same spot (in different directions) on Isla Del Sol in Bolivia. 'But hang on', you say, 'Bolivia is landlocked. You can't fool me. Bolivia has no coast. That can't be Bolivia.' Well it is! Hard as it is to believe, that water that you can see isn't the ocean. It's a lake. And it's not any old lake. It's quite a big lake, and it's called Lake Titicaca. It's so big that you can't see the far end of it, being about 160km distant. Lakes like that just don't exist where I come from. And the even more ridiculous thing is that this lake is a whopping 3800m above sea level. Let's think about this for a second. Here we have a lake 9000 square kilometres in area, containing an unimaginable 900 cubic kilometres of water, sitting nearly four kilometres above the ocean. What's more, there are mountains rising up from the lake, towering two kilometres above it! This is a country of astonishing proportions, famous for having the 'highest of everything', but it is a country that falls short of many a traveller's itinerary.

I arrived in Bolivia last Friday and decided to head out to Isla del Sol with my tent for a couple of days, to explore the relaxed but beautiful island. The walk to the end of the mainland was beautiful. This is what Isla del Sol looks like from the shore.



This two friendly locals helped me get there in their boat.



I'm now in La Paz, Bolivia's capital, awaiting Emma's arrival tomorrow evening. It would be fair to say that I'm quite excited! It's hard to believe that I'm catching a plane to New Zealand in three weeks. I really hope we can do this country justice by seeing a large part of what it has to offer for the curious traveller.