November 23rd, 2008

We flew from Cusco Peru and landed in Juliaca Peru. From there we drove to the town of Pumo on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca and stayed the night. There's something un-nerving about a five star hotel surronded by an electrified fence. Lake Titicaca is huge, 113 miles by 58 miles accross. Peru and Bolivia share the lake and it is major area for drug trafficing. We left Puno at 6:00 in the morning and made the Bolivian border by 10:00. We met our new guide and he walked us accross to Bolivian immigration and we cleared in 90 seconds, our guide was thrilled as it usually takes Americans 45 minutes to get cleared as they like to hassle us. We then proceeded to Cococabanna and then boarded a hydrofoil and sailed of to Sun Island. Sun Island is one of the nicest places I´ve ever visited. Beautiful vistas and beautiful people. Magda and I suspect that this island might be a place where cocaine money is laundered as there aren´t many tourists there. As a matter of fact, we haven´t seen a single American in Bolivia. From Sun Island we made our way slowly to La Paz. La Paz is a vertical city which is set over 13,000 elev. Breathing is hard, sleeping is hard with head pressure. I finally gave in and took the altitude pills my doctor gave me before I left and that did the trick. This morning, a man from our hotel was attcked down the street by three robbers, one choked him from behind while the other two went through his pockets and took his credit cards , wallet, watch and passport. He was very upset to say the least. Today when we toured we had no ID and I carried my credit cards and American money in my shoes-we left all of our jewelry in the US. We really liked our guide Antonio, he has about 15 drinks a day and smokes a joint before he goes to bed. He likes us because we don´t care about his drinking and he can do it in front of us. We cracked up at lunch when he let it slip that he didn´t drink that much after he put away 5 drinks right before our eyes. Tomorrow we take an early flight to Rio and we get a new guide. All the photos attached are from Bolivia. We absolutely adore this country and it´s people.

All is well and bye for now