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Published: October 9th 2011
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We had to wake up at some ridiculous hour in order to get our transfer from La Paz to Copacabana, our final destination in Bolivia. We got picked up in a little minivan along with two other Irish girls from our hostel and were taken about 5 minutes around the corner where a larger minivan was waiting for us, complete with French Canadian tourist group inside! Along the 3 hour drive to Copacabana the tourist group proceeded to take pictures constantly out of the windows of the bus and all got extremely excited at the sight of a llama! One of the men explained to me that they were on a guided tour around Peru for 2 weeks and had pretty much everything down to their toilet breaks neatly scheduled in for them and they simply had to sit on the bus and wait to be taken to their next destination...we thought it sounded like a nightmare!
When we arrived in Copacabana we were amazed at how massive Lake Titikaka actually is, it felt like we were by the sea as the only land you could see was some small floating islands about a mile out. One of the happysnapping
tourists told me that apparently the Lake is over 270km long! The bus driver kindly gave us a lift to our hostel as it was a little walk out of town but no sooner had we arrived and been shown where our room was, when Ben decided to snap the key off in the lock to the room, much to the shock of the manager. Luckily he had more rooms free and so we checked into a different room and apologised profusely! The town was pretty peaceful and sleepy so we walked around a little bit and stopped for some lunch in a small cafe right on the waterfront where we had some freshly caught trout from the lake! After lunch Ben decided he wanted to walk up this massive hill "to get some panoramic shots" so we dragged ourselves up a paved pathway, which turned into a mass of rocks which we had to pick our way around to get to the top, but the views from the top were pretty spectacular. I left "photographer Ben" to his own devices for a while and just wandered around the top and looked out into the Lake. After a veeerrry long time Ben was finally done with his photoshoot and we (carefully) made our way down and then stopped for some coffee.
Over the street from where we had our coffee was a hippie Peruvian man doing hairbraids and I decided it would be a brilliant idea for me to get one. I sat down on the floor and picked some colours for my braid and he went to work while I sat there completely oblivious to what he was up to. Ben was watched what he was doing and kept pulling confused and shocked faces which started to make me feel really nervous as to what exactly I had gotten myself into. After about 10 minutes Ben told me that the guy had cut my hair off but quickly said he was joking when I started to panic, I later found out that he had in fact cut my hair off and so now if I remove my braid Im going to have short little stump of hair at the back of my head, nice! The man the insisted that I get a whole collection of beads in the end of the braid, which I wasnt happy about and I hadnt signed up to be a human maraca! After the braid fiasco, we went to a restuarant for dinner which had been recommended by the guy that ran the hostel and for some reason decided to get a cheese fondue to share (this seems to be a bit of thing in Bolivia, as it was in England back in the 70´s I believe).
Next morning we had to get up really early as we were going to get a ferry over to the Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) which is where the Inca people believe that the Sun and the Moon where made. On the Island you have two options, you can be dropped off at the South side and then wander about a bit or you can be dropped at the North side and see some inca ruins and then do a 3 hour hike back to the South side to get the ferry back in afternoon. I had said to Ben on numerous occasions both the previous night and that morning that I really didnt want to do the hike but he insisted that we were going to do it...a decision I think he later regretted.
We walked for about 45minutes to get to the so called ruins...now as we have already mentioned in previous blogs you have to pay for everything in Bolivia...so we werent surprised to be asked to pay 10Bolivianos each to see the these supposedly very sacred ruins...so sacred they were indeed that some guy had just set up his little alpaca stall all over one of them...hmm apparently not so sacred then, so glad we paid to be able to see them. So, then came the hike...I again tried to persuade Ben to go back to the town on the North side but he wasnt having any of it so we started walking...to cut a long story short, I threw a strop and stormed off but after about half an hour walking by ourselves we realised we had a long way to go so started walking together again. The hike was pretty hard work with a loooot of hills and by the end of the three hours we were both pretty exhausted, but good practice we decided for Machu Picchu. When we finally arrived in the South of the Island we sat and ate our little packed lunches and then got on the ferry back to Copacabana and had an extremely early night!
Next day we had a later start and then walked into town and tried to sort out our jungle trip and then had a really nice lunch in the hotel where we had to get our bus from to Puno. At half one we got on the bus and ready to our fourth and final country...Peru.
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