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If you haven´t heard, there´s a place on earth called Lake Titicaca. It´s a marvellous place with an even better name. Just a few hours outside of La Paz, you can reach a place called Copacabana, which is right on the lake. From town there´s an hour and a half boat ride to Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun). This was a great chill place with a few hostels and restaurants scattered around a few small villages. In about four hours you can walk from one side to the other and see some Incan ruins over looking a small bay. We has to take the opportunity to swim in the lake. It just so happened there were some locals building a small dock who found it funny that a bunch of gringos where swimming in freezing water in their underwear. It started a conversation about the place and resulted in a lift back to our village...almost. We did get a great tour of the whole island and a lesson in the Inca language still spoken here eventhough we ended up in the wrong town, but it did cut our walk in half and only cost us a beer. Trout seems
to be the local specialty which was actually pretty good, the 3-4 times we had it in a row. Lake Titicaca is amazingly huge and practically empty. At times you can't make out land on the other end of the lake and the water was glass the entire time we were there. For miles and miles there is just open water and snow capped mountains to look at, plus the occasional llama walking around. Beautiful. After the island I decided to spend a day in Copacabana since it was a really nice town with beautiful hilltop view of the lake and the sunset.
Peru is just a few minuntes from Copacabana and the first stop on my agenda was Arequipa. Peru´s second largest city was really nice. Colonial town with a great square. Peru is a bit more expensive than Bolivia and you can almost immediately notice a change in atmosphere, starting with the buses. After a couple good nights out in town and a bullfight, where bulls fight other bulls, YES, I headed to Colca Canyon for some hiking. Heading there with a few others from the hostel, we elected to do the canyon without a guided tour,
Titicaca Girl
She really wanted her picture taken by all of us. which there were many and a bit expensive. We arrived in Cabanaconde and stayed in a great hostel where the owner played bartender for us all night making many drink from local fruits, many from cactus. He was also a wealth of information and helped us plan our trek route.
We had a very ambitious first day. We took a couple wrong turns, we blame our crappy map, but ended up in a little, ok, tiny village up in the hills after a good nine hours and steep inclines and downhills. On the way, during one of our wrong turns, we fortunately met the owner of a small hostel who put us up for the night, fed us dinner, breakfast and stayed up all night talking while drinking a $3 bottle of limon liquor with us. We had views of waterfalls and cliffs all around even while at the dinner table. We seemed to be the only gringos for miles around and the family waited on us with amazing hospitality. Kids would come up to us to say hi and luckily we had a big back of candies which made them all light up. Our second day hike was
mostly downhill to the bottom of the canyon which sounded nice to start but ended up being really steep and loose. We went for a dip in freezing river water and had a blast on the Indiana Jones sketchy bridges that crossed the rivers at the bottom. We came to the next town at the bottom of the canyon which was home to some hot springs and cold beers which go very well together especially after some long days of hiking. The next morning we got up early to try to catch a "bus" that makes a weekly trip from the bottom of the canyon to the top by means of some road which we never saw. The purpose of this "bus" is to help the farmers bring their produce to town. It turned out to be a 3+ hour hell trip, should have just taken another day and hiked back up. Though the canyon is amazing and you can see the occasional condor soaring around in the wind. Very peaceful and seemingly off the beaten path. We got back to Arequipa the next day spent a couple days not hiking then planned for Cusco, jumping off point to Machi
Picchu.
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