By Lynda Lovett

Three suggestions before you even contemplate travelling South America:

1. Do not fly Aerolinas Argentinas.
2. You must learn Spanish!
3. Prepare to have your mind blown!

In just under three weeks Brett (partner/husband), Ryan (20-year-old son) and I travelled through three countries, flew on six different planes, walked up to altitudes of 4,300m and had the experience of a lifetime.

We arrived in Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina, and although we were impressed by the architecture, overall we found Buenos Aires a grimy, dirty, bleak and depressing city. The fact that we were stuck at Buenos Aires Airport on the way to Bolivia for hours and hours during the night after a cancelled flight with no announcements in English and no boards to let us know what was happening could be forgiven….nearly! But the fact that we were nearly stuck there again on our way home because Aerolinas decided to bring forward our flight to Australia by two hours with no notice threw panic into our hearts. To be stuck in Buenos Aires for up to another week with no money, no accommodation and the expense of the Argentinian peso matched to the US dollar was unforgivable!

We had a couple of days in Buenos Aires before moving on. Buenos Aires, like New York, never shuts down. Traffic goes all night. Drivers sit with hands permanently glued to horns. Food in BA is delicious - and heaps of it. As stated before, fabulous architecture but most buildings need restoring. The Retiro, Buenos Aires's main railway station, for example, has a net attached to the roof, to catch the masonry falling off it. One senses a country that has no money to maintain its infrastructure. After spending more days in Buenos Aires than we should've (at Aerolinas's expense) we flew an antiquated 737 (Aerolinas again) into Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Slept all the way due to no sleep the night before and still jet-lagged from Australia.

Very impressed with Santa Cruz - organised, modern and clean -but it was only a little while before we were winging our way below snow capped mountains into La Paz c/o Aero Sur (we were meant to be on Lloyd Aero Boliviano!). These planes are old and badly need internal maintenance - ripped seats, missing seat pockets, no tables - and never on the ground. Twenty minutes changeover and it is back in the air again.

La Paz Airport is situated on the altiplano at 3,900m. A 'taxi driver' attached himself to us, loaded us into a rusty old Corolla wagon with no seat belts, and with hand on horn set off at a great rate of knots through the slums of El Alto (a separate city of 800,000) and down 400m into a canyon. The first sight of La Paz is unforgettable. At the edge of El Alto the earth drops away and there below is La Paz (a city of 1 million) - filling a canyon 5 km from rim to rim. Incredible!

The streets are narrow, steep and cobblestone, bustling with people in national dress - yes, the ladies wear those full skirts and bowler hats - and the all-pervading smell of urine - a smell that was not to disappear until we reached Buenos Aires again. Our hotel, the Residencial Rosario was charming. It was a Mexican design with several floors at different levels opening out into courtyards. Had to climb several flights of stairs and that's when we first noticed the altitude. The thin oxygen was not reaching our muscles and they were like jelly after just a few stairs. This is where we were also introduced to the South American toilet - fairly normal except the pipes are too narrow to take toilet paper, so you dispose of it in a bin next to the toilet!

That evening we met with our group. We were on a small group adventure holiday. In our group were the three of us, two doctors from Scotland, another Scottish fellow - a bit of a clown and his partner, Vicky who was an IT consultant, two single ladies from Toronto, Canada - Cat and Betty-Jo (they weren't travelling together) and a teacher from South Africa called Remo. Our leader was a 26-year-old Californian who had lived in South America for the past couple of years and spoke fluent Spanish - thank goodness! His name was Michael. As a group we got on famously. Went to a pena for dinner, had trout (trucha) from Lake Titicaca and saw a show with typical Andean music and dancing. I love this music. I have loved it for years and actually brought the flute that plays that haunting melody in El Condor Pasa. I can't get a sound out of it though! The walk back up the steep street to the hotel nearly killed me! However, La Paz fascinated us and we would love to have spent more time here.

The next day I found it very difficult to breathe. The shortness of breath is like a lump or a mild ache in the middle of the chest, although it affects people in different ways. You tire easily. Brett and Ryan were hardly affected at all - or so they say! We travelled out to the Tihuanaco ruins. The Tihuanaco were a pre-Inca civilisation. It is Bolivia's most significant archaeological site. Little is known of the Tihuanaco people, but it is believed this great civilisation rose about 600 AD. There are a large number of large stone slabs, a ruined pyramid and the remains of ritual platforms - very interesting. After looking through the museum and getting a run down on the history from our great guide called Juan Carlos, we had a typical Andean lunch (quinoa soup and omelette), then we went to a fiesta in the pueblo. Lots of colour and noise and music. Everyone was drunk and the place stunk of urine. The people pee anywhere and everywhere. We visited the original site of La Paz called Laja located at 4,100m.

Adventures again. We were meant to cross into Peru at Copacabana today, but about 5 kms out of El Alto, we came across a roadblock. There were huge rocks all over the road. There were hundreds of men running around, throwing rocks at and kicking the cars and buses, which were stopped everywhere. We didn't know if we were going to be robbed, taken hostage or just stuck there for days! When they started putting rocks behind our bus, the driver realised we would be trapped, so he turned round and hightailed it out of there. We took the only route left through a hole of a town called Desguardero. It was dirty, derelict and smelly and full of nutty people with faces that were disappearing under scabs and running sores. Had a suspect lunch.

Many hours later we walked through the border into Peru - stamps, forms and more forms. The claustrophobic bus followed the shores of Lake Titicaca, which is big and blue for four hours until we reached Puno. An interesting town, cleaner and seems a bit more organised, but I missed the colour and atmosphere of La Paz - also don't feel quite as safe, even though there are tourist police here to keep you from being hassled. Lake Titicaca is the world's highest navigable lake at 3,827m. It covers an area sea and of 8,000 square kms., is 170 kms long and 65 kms wide. It is the last remnants of a great inland sea and even today is declining in size through evaporation. It is full of trout and kingfish. We found out that all the borders from Bolivia were closed and two weeks later as I write this (October 2000) one cannot even fly into La Paz because the locals have blockaded the road between the airport and La Paz. Food is now being airlifted into La Paz. We got out by two hours!

Early the next morning we had 'rickshaw' races to the port to meet our boat to take us to Amantani Island. Brett and I won! We tipped our tubercular cough-ridden man well. Our first stop on Lake Titicaca was the Uros Islands - a fascinating place made entirely of the totora reed. There are 46 islands in the Uros group altogether and we visited two. The 'land' is 1.5 metres deep and as the reeds underneath rot, they are replaced by new reeds on top. It is like walking on a waterbed - a real weird sensation. We visited the school where the students - all 12 of them - sang to us.

We took a reed boat (shades of Thor Heyerdahl and Kontiki) to a neighbouring island and as we rounded a bend we surprised a gringa squatting in the banos. She shrieked and screamed! Had the dubious pleasure of using this apparatus myself. It was a bucket, full of urine and paper, suspended over a hole in a wonky reed hut; itself suspended over water, with no door, facing the vastness of the lake. Literally a room with a view!

The inhabitants of these islands fish, weave the reeds and even eat them (we had a taste!). After a further three rocky hours we reached Amantani Island where we were to stay the night with a local family. After 180m climb, where I literally lost my breath (we were at 4,000m) we reached the house of our family. It was a whitewashed adobe house. The mother of the family, El Salvia greeted us. She could not speak Spanish or English, only Quechua, so communication was very difficult. She was also very shy. She and her sons and daughters lived on the bottom floor and we were sleeping in a room above them. The father was away working in Arequipa saving money to build a boat. They wear traditional dress, which is beautifully embroidered.

Our meals with this family were all the same - for breakfast, lunch and dinner - quinoa soup, cold rice (much to Brett's disgust - as he says, try eating cold rice for breakfast), a variety of boiled potatoes and yams and beaten egg cooked into an omelette like cake. It was offensive to our hosts if we did not eat all the food!

We were invited into the kitchen to watch the cooking, but it was difficult to see because it was very dark and there was only one candle. The kitchen was a mud-brick dome built separately from the rest of the house. El Salvia and her eldest daughter Yannet had built it. The oven was also mud brick and the pots were clay. The oven was fed by straw to maintain heat. Around the walls were mud brick seats, which we sat on, and under these seats lived the guinea pigs, which scuttled backwards and forwards. They liked the heat and dark. Little wonder, as they were future dinners. Guinea pig or cuy is a favourite national dish.

After dinner Yannet took us to a fiesta in the community hall - also built of mud bricks. It was a wild night - cold and windy and sleety. We made our way by lantern light. Only the women asked people to dance. The dance was unusual. Our partners held our hands facing each other and when the music started (another typical Andean band dressed in national costume and played traditional instruments) they 'sawed' our arms back and forth and swung their hips. As the shortest song lasted 20 minutes our arms were ready to drop off by the end of the night.

Later that night there was an incredible thunderstorm. The blinding hail woke us. Ryan had hail all over his bed and Brett just got dripped on. I was lucky, except that of course once I was awake I had to go to the toilet - not much fun in the middle of a hailstorm. The door of the house was very low - even for me at 157cm. - so it meant stooping through the doorway, staying stooped under the low roof overhang, down a flight of vertical steps - each one about a metre apart, across the courtyard to the 'banos' behind the house. This was a tiny, narrow mud brick dwelling with a thatched roof with no door and a hole in the ground. It was so narrow you had to take down your trousers outside, back in, aim and hope for the best. Well, needless to say I missed…and my trousers and shoe smelled like the rest of Peru!

At first light we were surrounded by white - it had snowed! Icicles hung from the edge of the roof and it was bitterly cold. After washing and cleaning our teeth in the icy water running off the roof we donned our backpacks and made our way down to the harbour - to find no boat! There was no choice (according to Michael) but to get into another boat which was already overcrowded, no life jackets and generally unsound. We set off for Isla Taquile in huge waves. It was actually scary. The boat was at the mercy of the waves. Many were sick including Ryan. Michael's face became as thunderous as the sky. Someone was going to wear his anger when he got back to Puno.

When we arrived at Isla Taquile some went into the village and some stayed at the harbour. As it was yet another climb I stayed at the harbour. After an hour or so our boat chugged in next to us. It had broken down. Michael had planned to take us to Sillustani where there were some Inca burial tombs, but after this hiccup and then the boat running out of petrol on the way back to Puno - another scary time as the waves buffeted the boat - and then when the 'captain' did drop us off at the waiting mini bus he crunched into some rocks. The mini-bus was too mini to fit us all in.

Michael was really livid by now, so we gave up Sillustani for the day and went back to our wonderful hotel - Hostal Pucara - for a much needed hot shower and a decent toilet! This hotel was traditional Peruvian. It had an atrium the height of the hotel with internal windows looking out onto it and Peruvian craftwork decorating the adobe walls. What a wonderful firetrap!