Tag Archives: Copacabana

High-altitude golf and other oddities

Posted by Jenny in Humor, Memoir, Travel and tagged with , , , , ,

Bob takes a swing at the La Paz Golf Club driving range

When Bob, Steve, and I went to Bolivia, our goal was to climb a peak higher than 20,000′. For several reasons, which I will come to in another post, we failed in our quest. But we did achieve new personal highest-elevation marks in golf, ping pong, sea kayaking, mountain biking… and many other things.

If you are looking to acclimatize to really high elevations, there is no better place to go than La Paz. The acclimatization starts with the moment of arrival at El Alto airport, which stands above the city at 13,300′. Oxygen tanks are available for disembarking passengers in case of sudden collapse. I was disappointed when I got off the plane and did not feel faint. It was strange to think as I walked through the airport lobby that I was at the same elevation as maybe the 75th switchback above Trail Camp on the trail to Mt. Whitney.

Our flight from Miami had arrived early in the morning, and we took a cab down into the city, which runs from around 12,000′ down to a little below 11,000′. The more affluent neighborhoods are toward the bottom, where there is a bit of oxygen.

La Paz as seen from the cab going down into the city.

We did a little walking around the city. “Remember, we shouldn’t overdo it the first day,” we kept saying to each other. Overawed by our new surroundings, depleted of energy and lacking anything interesting to say, we were becoming tedious on the subject. Sort of deliberately tedious. It was like the way we and our friends would keep saying to each other on climbs of 14,000′-foot peaks, “Remember, keep hydrated,” repeating it far too often, on purpose. (Steve would chirp up with fake cheeriness, “Urine is clear, happy mountaineer!”)

There wasn’t much danger of going overly fast. Every time we walked uphill—and the whole city consists of hills—we gasped for breath. Our heads ached. Our legs felt rubbery. But we managed to visit the cathedral, where we saw women wearing bowler hats and black shawls.

In front of the cathedral

Over the next days, we found that processions, parades, and protest marches regularly occupied the major avenues.

Parade in downtown La Paz

Our Lonely Planet travel guide said the La Paz Golf Club was open to the public, so on the second day we went. The golf course is said to be the world’s highest, ranging from 10,750′ to 10,965′ at the highest hole. To get there, you go through an area of weird contorted rock called the “Valle de la Luna,” and the 12th hole on the course is called the “Lunar Hole.” It requires a shot of greater than 130 yards to clear a 50-foot drop over a moon-like landscape. But we were only there to visit the driving range.

This is not Bermuda.

Bob and Steve enjoyed whacking the ball through the thin air and seeing it sail off into the ether. Since I’d never played golf before (apart from mini-golf) and I’d never visited a driving range, my balls didn’t sail very far. But I enjoyed watching my companions marvel at the conditions.

On the third day we visited the resort town of Copacabana on Lake Titicaca, as described in my last Bolivia post. We ended up spending a day longer there than we’d planned because teachers on strike across the region had placed nails and other obstacles on highways leading in and out of La Paz. And on our way out, our bus did get a flat tire.

While we were in Copacabana, we played high-altitude ping-pong at our hotel and did high-altitude sea-kayaking on the 12,000′ elevation lake.

Bob’s orange sea kayak is visible toward the left of the fleet of more elegant local watercraft.

One morning, while I opted to sleep in at the hotel, Bob and Steve mountain-biked along the shore of the lake to the border with Peru. By the time we returned to La Paz, we felt we were ready for our warm-up trek, a trip into the Condoriri with our guide Hugo.

(To be continued)

Steve on the shore of Lake Titicaca

Bolivian cuisine

Posted by Jenny in Food, Humor, Memoir, Travel and tagged with , , , , ,

Three years after our trip, McDonalds withdrew from the Bolivian market.

Steve stared sadly at his food. It was a skinless chicken leg sitting in a puddle of water in the midst of a vast white plate. It looked as though it had been boiled.

But it was all his fault—the only food word in Spanish he had mastered was “pollo,” or chicken, and he hadn’t been able to distinguish between the ten types of chicken listed on the menu. I would have tried to help him with my limited Spanish, but he was tired of asking for assistance, and he had rashly pointed to the first chicken dish listed on the menu. “Pollo,” he said to the waiter, who smiled and repeated, “Pollo.”

We’d been in the resort town of Copacabana for a couple of days. Located on the shore of Lake Titicaca, the town serves as a jumping-off point for boat trips to the historic ruins of Isla del Sol and a getaway from the giant city of La Paz.  We took a bus from La Paz to Tiquina Strait, crossed on a rickety ferry while the bus was barged across separately, then reboarded the bus.

While we waited to get on the ferry, we strolled around a square that featured a statue with a rather dramatic painting on the side. I believe the subject is the bitter war fought between Bolivia and Chile, which the latter country won, ensuring that Bolivia would remain landlocked. Bolivia still has a navy that symbolically reflects its aspirations to have a coastline—we saw the navy marching in a parade.

In the painting, someone is getting bayoneted.

When we arrived in Copacabana, we climbed the Cerro Calvario as part of our acclimatization program before we set forth to climb some real mountains.

Bob and Steve atop Cerro Calvario

In the high, thin, dry air at 12,000′, it was easy to get hungry but not so easy to find something good to eat. All of the Copacabana restaurants featured the “trucha,” or lake trout, but we didn’t want to have that at every meal. Gastronomically speaking, the safest choice was pasta in one form or another. We tried all the major restaurants available at that time (1999), discovering that for some mysterious reason, several of them played Cat Stevens tunes from the 70s on their piped-in sound systems. Maybe some influential expat residing there was a big Cat Stevens fan.

For lunch one day, I ordered hamburger. When I took a bite, I realized that the meat was not beef. What it was, I do not know. I worried that it might be guinea pig, a common dish in the Andes.

Once back in La Paz, we resorted to the McDonalds a couple of times. I’ve since learned that McDonalds pulled out of Bolivia in 2002 because of its poor profit margins, ceding the territory to Burger King. According to an article I read, some Bolivians felt “deceived and betrayed,” while others said,  “Good riddance!” The McDonalds menu was too expensive for most Bolivians to afford.

Bolivia is said to be the poorest country in South America, a nation more inclined toward potatoes, cold cuts, and sausages than fancy gourmet cooking.

“Concerning flavor, consult our products. Sausages and cold cuts.” A baby llama stands in front of the billboard.

But Bolivia boasts scenery that is beyond compare, and that makes it all worthwhile. More on Bolivia in future installments.

Lake Chiarkota in the Condiriri