Lost at the Lake

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We missed the bus to Lake Titicaca. I had left Kit in charge of buying the tickets. The previous evening, we had had the following conversation.

Me: Are you sure the bus is definitely at 8?
Kit: YES I AM SURE, DON’T QUESTION ME WOMAN.

The bus was not at 8. The bus was at 7, we were a whole hour late. Amazingly, instead of laughing at the stupid gringos and trying to sell us another ticket, the lady at the bus station sprang to our rescue, phoned the driver of our bus, told him to wait for us and stuffed us in a taxi. The taxidriver, presumably having been instructed to chase down the bus as fast as possible, managed to catch up with the thing just outside of Cuzco where it’d stopped to load cargo. So we got away with it, due to the helpfulness of the Peruvian people and the sloppiness of their transport timetabling.

We arrived at the border late in the afternoon, in time to miss a beautiful sunset over the lake whilst trudging through immigration. Wandering into the first hostel we came across, we were delighted to find that Bolivia is cheaper than Peru. Sweet. We can afford hot water. We stuffed our face with fresh fish and went to bed.

The next day we were planning to take a trip to Isla Del Sol, biggest island on the lake, birthplace of the Inca creation story and supposed preserve of traditional Bolivian life. We awoke to a town-wide powercut, which somewhat shit up our plans. The bank and the single ATM were out of order, and we were out of money. Completely. I wandered around trying to change traveller’s cheques at the various little shops and stalls, eventually locating a guy who would do it for me. Only problem was that due to the powercut, he couldn’t get the photocopy of my passport necessary to validate the cheque. We negotiate an arrangement whereby he keeps my passport and gives me the money, with the cheques to be sorted out the following day when I return from the island, assuming power has been restored. This seems reasonable to me. So we set off for the island, but not before Kit insists we go hat shopping, and buy matching hats. I mocked him, but these purchases will soon save us from certain disaster. Yes, really. Read on.

Day one on the island was lovely. We walked through terraced fields of crops, were accosted by freely roaming livestock, observed traditional farming methods, and so on. It certainly did feel a step back in time from the mainland. A small child tried to eat my packet of contact lenses, believing them to be some kind of exotic sweets.

The place we chose to eat that evening was clearly just some bloke’s house with ‘restaurant’ written on a bit of paper stuck to the door. There were two rickety tables outside and only one dish on the menu - grilled fish. That was fine. We like fish. We also ordered the only side dishes on offer, bread and cheese and wine. This caused the restaurateur to fly into a panic. We watched him running down the road, stopping at each shop or house, frantically trying to acquire cheese. Half an hour later he returned, looking pleased with himself. We reminded him about the wine. He ran off again, looking stricken. I wondered if someone had written ‘restaurant’ on his door as some kind of practical joke. Anyway, the food was tasty and the view of the sunset was beautiful. Until it got cold. I watched until I was shivering too much, then retreated to our room for the night.

Now the next day went slightly wrong. We were supposed to take a leisurely stole across the island to another village, where the boat back to mainland would be awaiting us. This should have been fairly simple, given that the island is about 5km across, 8km long and home to just three small settlements. But no. At some point, we lost each other. Don’t ask me how this occurred. I’m not sure. I think I may have been doing what Kit would describe as “faffing around taking photos”. He wandered off, I wandered off in a not entirely similar direction. We have had a LOT of discussion about who went in the wrong direction and whose fault it was. Turns out, mine. The problem was that the boat had dropped us off in a different place to where we thought it was supposed to (which explains why non of the hostels mentioned in our guidebook seemed to exist...), so we were navigating on the totally flawed assumption that we were starting from the largest settlement on the island. If anyone thinks Isla Del Sol is touristy, try getting lost there for four sodding hours. There are, I guarantee you, still untouched havens where you can escape the crowds and experience the authentic delights of wandering onto someone’s farm and being chased by dogs.

Eventually I found my way back to civilisation, and it dawned on me that I was in completely, hopelessly the wrong place. It takes about four hours to walk the length of the island. I didn’t have time to make it back across before dark. I couldn’t be sure where Kit was. I didn’t know whether he had gone back to the first village to look for me, whether he was waiting in the correct place or whether he had figured out that I had gone the wrong way and was coming here to find me. I considered my dilemma.

Just then, a group of Aussie tourists came over to me to impart the following piece of information

‘Your boyfriend is looking for you, and he is REALLY pissed off’.

Awesome. Turns out Kit was on the opposite side of the island, at the place we were supposed to be getting the boat from. He had been going around telling everyone he met that he was looking for his girlfriend who was wearing a hat like his. Given that our hats were, shall we say, distinctive... it didn’t take people long to identify who he was talking about. This was a start, but I still didn’t have time to walk over there, and the last scheduled boat had already gone. Using my shockingly poor Spanish skills, I tried negotiating with various blokes with boats to see if I could rent a private ride to the other side of the island. Unfortunately they also recognised me as Girl With Hat. Clearly Kit had spoken to one of them earlier in the day, and they knew full well that I needed to get over there and didn’t have any other option. After literally an hour of talking and walking away, I managed to get one of them to agree to a price I could just afford. I wasn’t being difficult, I just needed to keep enough money to get a room for the night and buy tickets back to the mainland. Bear in mind we had only been planning to spend one day here and I hadn’t managed to get much money due to the powercut. I ended up paying something like 7 quid, which felt like an absolutely astronomical amount at the time. Anyway I chartered my little boat and arrived at the other village, emerging from the mist and twilight ‘like something out of apocalypse now’, in Kit’s own words. He had been sat on the dock waiting for me, and he was utterly, apoplectically fucking furious. Kit, not having brought any traveller’s cheques to South America, had no money whatsoever and had been seriously contemplating making a nest for the night in some nearby bushes. When he had calmed down, we found a room at the crappest place in the village and haggled an affordable meal. Kit, in his wisdom, decided to spend the last of our money on a bottle of beer, meaning that the next morning after buying the boat tickets we had not a penny left for breakfast. Or water. What followed was a very long, slow, hot journey back to the mainland, lying on our backs at the front of the boat, sweating, dearly hoping that the power cut was over and my passport had not been sold to smugglers. Thankfully we returned to find power restored and my passport safe and sound. We could change some traveller’s cheques and EAT and DRINK. Joy.

So, that was an adventure. After rapidly rehydrating and stuffing our faces with pizza we jumped on the cheapest, crappest bus to La Paz. On the bus we found two of our friends from the hostal in Cuzco, who’d just had their bags nicked. We realised that we’d been pretty lucky so far, all things considered. This journey was notable only for the fact that they made us get off the bus and onto a boat at one point while they floated the bus across a river on some kind of bizarre, gigantic wooden raft.

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