Puno, Copacabana, Lake Titicaca and Isla del Sol
Trip Start
Jun 15, 2008
1
14
102
Trip End
Jun 14, 2009
Copacabana,
Bolivia
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Spent a day in Puno and the floating islands on Lake Titicaca on the Peruvian side. the floating islands are amazing everything is made out of reeds, the island, the houses, the the boats and the food. Whenwe were leaving to go back to Puno the sun had set and my God did it get cold fast the temp easily dropped below freezing from about 15 degrees earlier.
31/07/08
Up early and got the Colectur bus to theborder with Bolivia. We had heard some real scary story about an Irish girl being strip sacrhed at this bordr crossing lately by male police officers but thankfully our crosing was straight forward. We continued on the bus to Copacabana which is a very small sleepy town on the shores of Lake Titicaca. We checked into our lovely hotel which has heat (only our third place in South America that has heat) then went for lunch. The speciality in town is trout and it wa lovely! two big trout dinner with drinks for 5 euro equivalent. We then booked our tiket for the following day to go see the Isla del Sol on the Lake.
Note for Borehm- i now know what it must be like in SA with load shedding- the town here gets cut off regularly and all afternoon the town and shops andhotels were on backup generators.
1/8/08
All set we walked dwn to the port early to get our boat to the island. Our enthusiamstarted to wain very quikly though because the boat driver couldn't seem to find second gear and i swear thee were fishes swimming faster than we were going. an old woman in a row boat fishing even past us out!! The boat trip took 2 hours to get to the island and then the tour and trek commenced. There were aload of Irish on the boat and one or two got a bad dose of the motion sickness. Our tour guide spoke only spanish so e only picked up the key points. We saw the Gold museum and walked up to the tremple of the sunto see the Puma in the sacred rock and then spent the next 2 and a half hours trekking through the mountains of the island to get to the south which was the pickup point for the boat home. When we got to the port we saw the other Irish people again which we didn't see during the day, turns out they didn't do thehike up the mountain they just waited at the north port and got a lift to the south port later in the day. Wheni mentioned to one of the girls , Cailin, that Sarah was from Mayo she pointed out that her friend Edel was from Castlebar so when the two girls saw each other the peny dropped all three girls are RCSI!! and Edel used to do her final year project in Sarah's lab- what a small world! Turns out the Irish are gooinng to La Paz today and we are going tomorrow so we might bump into them again.
went for a fabolous dinner later in Oruro restaurant which is in the Lonely Planet- this book is a godsend
2/8/08
Leaving Copacabana this morning to go to La Paz. Photos will be uploaded soon :o)
