Food

Lead-up to Inti Raimi When I arrived in Cusco it was the beginning of the lead-up to Inti Raimi (Quechua Inti: Sun, Raimi: Festival), the festival of the sun around the solstice. Even before the festival on the 24th of June, every day there is marches and celebration in the town square of Cusco where the different departments and institutions of Cusco present themselves and their tradition. Sadly I had to leave Cusco just before the solstice but I would have loved to see the actual show at saksay huaman. ...

Before arriving to La Paz I had to stay another night somewhere. I found a nice mountain pass with a small maintenance road to an antenna tower. It was a little windy but in the slipstream of the car I was able to cook some dinner without the wind blowing out the gas stove. El Alto On my way to La Paz I had to go through El Alto. El Alto has a larger population than La Paz itself. While La Paz is in the valley, El Alto is on the plane around the valleys edges and is much more of a sprawl than La Paz. The quality of the buildings is also significantly lower. From La Paz there is multiple cable car lines going up to El Alto. ...

Potosi On our way to Sucre, Bismarck and I drove through Potosi - a mining town where his brother lived. Bismarck told me that Potosi used to be the richest town in the world and bigger than London in its heyday. That was because there was an insane amount of silver deposits in the mountains and still to this day the silver mine is active. From Potosi they shipped the silver down the river and over the Atlantic back to Spain which is the reason that Argentina, the “Rio Plata” and “La Plata” are named after the precious metal. We only went to town to get an ice cream however and then we were back on our way to Sucre. ...

The Flight The first weird thing that I noticed on this journey was that there were a lot of german dudes going to Santiago de Chile with me. In a glimpse at one of them I saw that they all had their names and Bayern International on the card that was dangling around their necks on a leather lanyard. Definitely something political going on there. ...