The name sucks. But the new MacBook Pro looks promising. I guess I’ll have to convince my boss to provide me with one of those as my work machine.

The blogug.ch list has lead to some nice additions in the Swiss blogosphere. Matthias of blog.ch is now using them for some more views. He also analyses the long tail of the Swiss weblogs. Most of the tags apparently come from list.blogug.ch. So dear bloggers in Switzerland: please claim your weblog and edit your tags. Or alternatively: become an administrator and tag other weblogs. Meanwhile Alain (who also provides the blogug.ch domain name) announced the gallery of Swiss weblogs. Leu then compiled a 30 seconds blog movie from the screenshots. I’ll try to include the screenshots into the blog list next week. Also I’ll have to find a way to automatically add new blog.ch subscriptions to the blog list because most additions still are added over there. Also I’ll have to work with Matthias on the URL sheme. Because I manually normalized all URLs in the blog list (adding slashed to domain names for example) he missed many of the tags (see his blog tags where many blogs lack the language tags which I have added to every blog). So stay tuned for the update, I’ll try to do something next week.

From Puno we went on to Bolivia. “We” because I got to know a German couple (Matthias & Daniela, picture only available if you’re on my Flickr contact list) in Puno with whom I continued my trip. So we went to Copacabana where we stayed for one day (two nights). We chose the really nice and moderately cheap hotel Continental. My room provided a beautiful view over Lake Titicaca and cost 50 Bolivanos a night (80 for matrimonial I think). We rented a pedalo, enjoyed the beautiful weather and the cheap food. The next day we took the bus to La Paz. That bus had some troubles. It came about two hours late and the organisation wasn’t really able to handle the problems. We were already thinking about getting our money back, skipping La Paz and returning to Puno the next day. But in the end we were glad we didn’t do that. In La Paz we went to the hotel Torino which also cost 50 Bolivanos for good quality but not on par with Copacabana’s Continental. We took the tourist tour bus which during about 3.5 hours drove us through La Paz and the nearby Moon Valley. The evening we spent at the restuarant Dumbo where we enjoyed some of the best food and service in our live for ridicilously cheap prices. We each paid about 50 Bolivanos for that meal including a bottle of wine which we shared. I also bought three more Narnia books for 15 Bolivanos each. And we went to see the Narnia movie in the cinema. The next morning we took the bus to Puno. We left at about 8 o’clock and arrived at around 1 pm. I checked out the returning buses to Lima and ended up using Cruz del Sur again. This time I had the standard class Imperial from Puno to Arequipa (the same average service I had from Lima to Cusco two weeks ago) and the luxurious Cruzero (with something to sleep in that almost deservers the word “bed”) from Arequipa to Lima. Unfortunately I had just a few minutes stop in Arequipa because the first bus was late. I arrived the next morning at 10 o’clock in Lima just 50 meters from my office. And because I had slept well in the bus I went straight to the office to check my mail, update my weblog and sync with my blogroll. A few news related to my blogroll might come up shortly.

Saturday early morning I arrived in Puno by bus. This allowed me to take some beautiful sunrise pictures. From the bus terminal I then went directly to a two-day tour of the Lake Titicaca. We first went to the Uros floating islands. The Uros build these islands of reeds. One island lasts about ten years. After that, they have to build a new island which takes about two months. After visiting two of these islands we continued to the island Amantani. The trip there took us three hours on the boat. This island is the second-biggest on the lake after Isla de Sol. We were distributed to different families after arriving. We went to the family and ate lunch at their house. We then met our guide again to climb a mountain-top. From there we were able to watch the sunset. This is probably the first day where I have pictures of the sunrise as well as the sunset. In the evening we had a party where I learned a simple local dance. We spent the night at the families houses. In the morning we went to the Taquile island which took us about one hour. We walked around the island, ate some really good fish at a restaurant and left for Puno again. After another three-hour trip we arrived there. We were very lucky with the weather. While it is the rainy season, we had sun for almost the whole two days. So the long boat trips were really cool. Also I can especially recommend the Amantani island. It’s quite untouristic so far and you actually get to sleep at families houses. It’s culture is still very authenthic as tourism only came here five years ago. But how long this will last, I don’t know. There is a map of the Lake Titicaca at Wikipedia. It shows you the position of the two islands Amantani and Taquile. It also shows how little of the lake we have actually navigated during this two days. I am currently still uploading pictures and probably won’t get to upload all of them until returning to Lima next week. See all the current Lake Titicaca pictures.

Wow, that took a while. But in order to be able to use the full capacity of my camera for Puno, Lake Titicaca and La Paz I just uploaded all of the pictures to Flickr. 96 new pictures for your pleasure.

Yesterday I went to Machu Pichu. I went with Stephen, whom I had met in a Cusco restaurant on Tuesday. Boy am I glad that I went there. When I first came to Peru I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to do Cusco and Machu Pichu. Machu Pichu is a city of the Incas, built around 1440. It was then “forgotten” (some locals still knew about it) until in 1911 Hiram Bingham rediscovered the city. The Peruvian government then made sure it became a tourist attraction. Wikipedia has much more information about Machu Pichu. It was a rainy day, though it only rained maybe half of the tour. And the weather allowed for some very nice views because of the clouded mountains. Generally, I found Machu Pichu mostly worthwhile for it’s stunning views. It’s embedded in the middle of a few mountains. I’m including here a few of my pictures. There are many more on Flickr.

Wednesday in the afternoon we visited the Inca museum in Cusco. I can highly recommend it. Gives good information about the pre-inca and Inca cultures. Even includes some colonial stuff. The entrance fee to the museum was 10 soles. We also took a guide who spoke English and expected a tip. And I would not recommend taking the tour without the guide. You miss too much information without one.

Krass, die NZZ bietet doch jetzt tatsächlich RSS Feeds an. Hatte mich vor wenigen Wochen endlich von den NewsIsFree Feeds abgemeldet, weil die Werbung zu umständlich war. Und Swissinfo und tagesschau.sf.tv bieten auch gute News. Mit RSS. Scheint aber so, dass die NZZ endlich im 21. Jahrhundert angekommen ist (sorry, bin ein bisschen gemein). Willkommen.

After a long 20 hour bus trip I arrived in Cusco on the second of January (with the conclusion that next time I’ll take the plane). I then checked into a nice hotel called Incawasi located just at the Plaza de Armas. I then took the opportunity to catch some sleep after a long New Year night. Then yesterday I walked around Cusco a bit without doing any “serious” sight-seeing yet. Went eating in the evenign and met an American called Stephen. Went out for a beer together and called it a night. Today we booked our passage for Machu Pichu. So tomorrow I’ll finally visit that archeological site. I hope it’s as impressive as it sounds. A funny thing happened when we booked the tour, though. There were two offers: one day and three days. The one day tour cost 120 US Dollars while the three day tour cost 119 US Dollars. Seriously! Apparently they are trying to promote the longer tour. But the time just doesn’t suffice for the long tour. So tomorrow early in the morning we’ll leave and I hope I can provide you with some interesting information and pictures abut Machu Pichu on Friday. Friday night I will continue to Puno. At the same agency I booked the bus to Puno with a two day tour for Lake Titicaca including one night at a hotel. All for 39 US Dollars. Sometimes prices sure are cheap here in Peru. But not for Machu Pichu.

For the next two weeks I’ll be travelling a bit in the south of Peru. I’m currently planing to do Cusco (and Machu Pichu), Puno, La Paz (Bolivia) and if time permits, Arequipa. As I have been to Arequipa for one month I’m not prioritising that very highly. And everything except the initial trip on that list is quite provisional. It may well be that I pick fewer or different places. So the next two weeks my posting will be very spare if I do any at all. But I guess I’ll have to do some Flickr uploads from Internet cafes as my memory card is a bit limited and I’m not taking my laptop. Oh and I wish you a happy new year.