La Paz (Bolivia) to Nasca (Peru)

We took a bus  from La Paz to Copacabana. This is the main town on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca. Apart from being on the lake, it also has a rather nice basilica.

Lake Titicaca is huge, and the was at the heart of the Inca Empire, many of the Inca creation legends involve the lake. It is at a similar elevation to  La Paz and so can be quite cool, despite having blazing sun that can quickly burn you. Well it did me anyway. We left Copacabana for Puno, which is also on the banks of the Lake, but on the Peruvian side. 

From Puno we took the train to Cuzco. The trains here run through town centers. In the  town of Juliaca it runs right through the middle of a market. Vendors move their stalls when the train comes, and some leave their stock between the tracks. I took this photo from the back of the train as we passed through.

Cuzco was the capital city of the Inca Empire. Today it still contains many Inca features, and  a huge amount of well preserved colonial architecture. Unfortunately it is also heavily touristed. The main plaza has a McDonalds, a Starbucks and a KFC, an unusual level of North American cultural encroachment for a Latin American city. 

We left Cuzco for a 12 hour bus journey to Nasca, but Pacha Mama had other plans. This is the flooded road that our bus was supposed to take. The bus journey ended up taking 26 hours. 

Floods were not the only threat. There were literally hundreds of rock falls and land slides on the road. Often the rocks were the size of  cars. Somehow the bus driver managed to negotiate all of them. 

Nasca is a really nice little Peruvian town, but people don't come just for that. They come to see the line patterns in the desert, made by a pre-columbian culture. The patterns can only be seen from aircraft. We took an over flight to see several of them, but they don't photograph well. Tomorrow we leave for Arequipa, which is the second largest city in Peru.