Copacabana - Lake Titicaca

  Copacabana, Bolivia
Wednesday, July 12, 2006

I left LaPaz with Adam on a Chicken bus, sitting in the cramped isle for a few hours, it seems like days but eventually we arrived in Copacabana and found a pair of helpless chicas. A Frenchy and Canadian. We teamed up and found a decent place to stay. It was cold and slightly windy when we arrived. We had a few hours to wait before the sun would set over the lake so we found a pizza joint and had a beer, then wandered around the hippie filled streets. Lined with desperate, broke hippies, trying to pay their way by selling trenzas and bracelets and other trinkets they had weaved while presumably off their heads on mushrooms or something like that.
We wandered around the streets and noticed that the sun had sunk a lot quicker than we expected.
We headed to the sandy waterfront, overlooking the mind blowing huge lake, that could have fooled me if you told me it was the ocean. The lake had a horizon of water! unreal!
We hired one of those paddle boats and loaded up with beers, paddling into the sunset, which looked mostly like this, but much, much better:


We were out in the lake with our beers and our paddle boat when the sun dipped below the horizon, sending a glow of amazing colors all over the sky. Sunsets and high altitudes are just spectacular. But the second the sun dipped, it got damn cold and we quickly paddled in and ran to a nearby pub to warm up. We spent the rest of our night playing pool and chilling in someones lounge room that had been converted into a pub.

Isla del Sol
Island of the Sun - The birthplace of the Incan Sun.
A very significant site, if your an Incan, where supposedly the sun was born from a rock called ´Titicaca Rock´ or ´Rock of the Puma´
I took a boat ride to the island to marvel at this spectacle. They told us it was good!!!! The boat to the island, we were told, would take take 1.5 hours. Somebody forgot to tell them that a 75hp motor wont propel a huge boat full of 200 tourists into the wind!
It was the slowest boat ride of my life, taking 2.5 hours to get the island. We were completely over it by the time we got there. We slept, and woke up basically where we had closed our eyes. Very very slow.
When we eventually reached the island, we were bitterly disappointed. Basically its just a big dry island with a few incan ruins.
Teaming up with the French and American, I walked from one side to the other, which took 3 hours in the high altitude, dry blistering sun. Along the way we got chatting with a local kid, who asked if he could come with us. We said sure, why not. This little kid, turned out to be a blessing. He knew every fact and figure about the island and the Incas that lived there. Telling us stories and detailing, the battles, as only a 10 year old can. He was great and at the end, we gave him a few pencils and a little cash.
It was a long hot and tiring walk across the barren island with nothing to see but dust devils and dry patches of dirt.
The boat ride back to Copacabana was equally painful, but we ended the night with many many beers to drown our sorrows and left the next day to Puno...