La Paz

So I 'did' Machu Picchu, but it was raining so unbelievably hard I didn't dare take the camera out and take any pictures and there was too much low cloud to really get a sense of the layout, was still pretty impressive though, more for the location than the actual ruins.  Went for pancakes for breakfast on Christmas day and the hostel did a Christmas lunch, by Christmas I'd spent a week in Cusco and was pretty keen to get out of Peru, so took an overnight bus down to Puno on the edge of Lake Titicaca.  The next day I cycled round to the Bolivian side of the lake at Copacobana, still lots of cloud and placid Aymarans keeping placid cattle, it seems like not much happens up there; I even saw a bike with rod pull brakes, which I'm pretty sure became obsolete about 100 years ago.  Anyway, passed into Bolivia without any problems, spent the night in a pretty dingy hostel in Copacobana, had planned to camp by the beach but it started to rain heavily about an hour before sunset and turned my campsite into a bit of a bog.

The next morning it was still raining on and off, and there was an ominous lack of buses and people hawking bus tickets in Copacobana, it turns out the government had doubled petrol prices overnight and so all the roads into and out of La Paz were supposedly blockaded.  Had a fairly wet day getting to La Paz but said road blocks failed to materialise, instead I bumped into the French couple on a tandem who I first met at Quito airport, pretty long odds especially as we were both lost somewhere in El Alto (the sprawling sister city to La Paz).  Had a day off in La Paz the next day, and wasted most of it in my most cherished pursuit of inner tubes, didn't find any, but did manage to spend about GPB30 on cereal bars and dried fruit stocking up for the next few days as I knew I was heading for the middle of nowhere.  Met up with the French couple again in the evening to swap some stories, given that they're heading for the same place as me we'll probably bump into each other again somewhere in Chile.

The next morning I headed out of La Paz for the Chilean border, I was aiming for a string of Volcanoes and national parks along the Chilean/Bolivian border for a few days offroad cycling and wild camping.

A few photos of Lake Titicaca and one of the view on the way into La Paz.