The Travelling Buncebury's

covering 27 Dec – 28 Dec 2018 Salar de Uyuni - salt as far as you can see We were setting off to see what turned out to be some of the most stunning scenery we’ve seen anywhere.   Very different, very charismatic, very wild and remarkably empty of humans.   First though was the inevitable coach journey.   A little after we got going, the driver’s mate, there’s always one, came out from the cab and turned on a film with a ridiculously noisy soundtrack.    I shouted as loud as I could from halfway down the bus and told him to turn it down.   To my surprise a chorus of similar calls followed me along with shouts of ‘nobody wants it’ and the like.   It was just like the House of Commons except that he did change his mind and turned the whole thing off.   He made his way back into the cab to a round of applause.   Very satisfying.   About three hours into the trip we stopped at some out of the way café and Heather realised that a woman and four young children were travelli

Volcan Illimani from La Paz Traffic was completely snarled up in La Paz when we arrived but fortunately we were dropped right at our hotel by the Bolivia Hop bus, as it’s now called.   It was raining too which was the first we’d seen since some overnight rain way back in the Dominican Republic.   We had some questions and had to call in at the Peru Hop office which was fortunately just round the corner from our hotel and we were presented with a customer satisfaction questionnaire.    The questionnaire age range for customers was in decades but it ended at 50.   It just said 50+ so that showed us exactly what theirexpected demographic was – and we weren’t it. one of my avid readers We weren’t at all impressed with La Paz, there’s not much to see of interest and decent restaurants were difficult to find.   We’d look up a recommended one on say, Trip Advisor and when we turned up it would be a grubby little café.   There was one really good coffee shop though r

  the view from the hotel garden the scrum at Bolivian border control We were still on the lake but now on the Bolivian side in a town called Copacabana staying in a very imaginatively designed hotel on a steep hillside.   Lots of separate rooms with little bits of garden around them.    It was bit like Gaudi meets a Hobbithouse and we were near the top.   Then we were asked to change rooms because somebody wanted the triple we were in.   Not very happy because we had great views across the lake.   Anyway, Heather negotiated the room above the one we were in which was much bigger and the top-most room with even better views for about £2 a day more.   We had a king size bed, a small wood burner, a small kitchen area and our own jacuzzi plus the view.   Fantastic. our room at the top the blessing of the car  Copacabana was a nondescript place with a curving grubby beach of greyish looking sand with the land rising behind it but it did

Lake Titicaca   Lake Titicaca straddles the Peru/Bolivia border so this blog is definitely the last I’m writing about Peru.   This lake has always seemed to me to be another one of those impossibly romantic sounding locations but I hadn’t thought too hard, well not at all really, what it would be like but this wasn’t it.   I suppose I was expecting a desolate cold, empty altiplano denuded of trees but with reedy vegetation around the edge possibly with snow in sheltered spots.   I was certainly expecting a selection of snow-capped mountains to look at.   It is after all at 12,500 feet (same height both sides apparently) and it’s the highest navigable lake in the world.   At 3,232 square miles it is pretty big as well.   Dorset is 1,024 square miles.   However, it has towns around it and the one we were in, the eminently forgettable Puno was hot.    However, Puno does have the wonderfully named Machupizza Pizzeria. one of the relaxed locals We arrived after