wild bus ride from La Paz to Copacabana

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Ronald and I took all my luggage up the hill to his Auntie’s house in Alto La Paz, at one of the highest points of the city. We headed up by Trufe and walked the rest of the way up into the clouds. We both packed little rucksacks with just the essential stuff and made our way to Copacabana. Before heading there, Ronald’s cousin, Franklin invited us to lunch in a restaurant where we had a four course meal - starter, then soup, then meat with potatoes and rice, and dessert – arroz con leche, rice pudding and apple juice. Here in Bolivia people eat enormous sized portions, but most of the food is home grown and there is a wide variety. If you want milk here you get it straight from the cow.

The bus ride to Copacabana was wild. As Copacabana is fairly touristy the buses going there were big, tourist buses but they didn’t have toilets, air-conditioning or seatbelts. Buses with toilets, air-conditioning and seatbelts haven’t yet reached Bolivia. There were only two seats left at the front with the driver so we got in. Neither us nor the driver had seatbelts and there was nothing between us and the front windscreen which was pretty scary. Lots of parts of the roads were covered in holes, random rocks fallen from the mountains were sticking out in the middle of the road and we got caught in a hailstorm which battered the front windscreens, steamed them up so we could barely see anything and the water leaked through the bus onto us and our stuff. It’s not the first time I’ve been to a less developed country, I’d been to Thailand and Laos, so I wasn’t surprised to find the standards of road travel were low but I had forgotten what it was like to travel on them after travelling in Argentina and Chile, where standards of safety were not much lower than European standards. It was a bit of a fright.

Once we got to Lake Titicaca we all had to cross in an old boat. The bus crossed the lake in a separate old boat. Here we were almost on the border with Peru. On the other side we all got back on the bus and had a very scenic drive through the mountains. The bus driver then drove on any side of the road he felt like, and used his mobile phone. Ronald and I being at the front had the best views. We passed lots of indigenous women going about their day to day life wearing their hats and their colourful clothes, farmers herding sheep, wild alpacas and wild pigs dotted around. Relieved to have made it to Copacabana we went to look for a hostel with wifi which was incredibly hard to find.

We had a bit of time before sunset so we began following Ronald’s uncle’s to do list. We went in Copacabana church which was the first church created by the Spanish in Bolivia. From the outside it wasn’t very fancy but inside it was elegant and elaborate, we lit some candles in ‘Sanctuario de las Velas’ and stopped by Plaza de 2 de Febrero where we saw a smaller version of Ahorca de Inca where the Incas used to hang their criminals.

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