Copacabana Bolivia - Scummy traveller hang out

Copacabana seemed nice enough after we travelled back from the jungle on a slightly less scary plane ride, though the co-pilot did have leather fingerless aka Micheal Jackson gloves on, which concerned me a little bit.

We took a local rapido van from La Paz and the three hours was uneventful until we all had to get out next to Lake Titicaca (Te Te Ka Ka) and take a separate 5 minutes ferry to the van, very strange.

Copacabana had its Sunday market on when we arrived so it was very busy and colourful. We booked into our first lonely planet splurge hotel on top of the hill overlooking the town. It was a very nice hotel but the room stank of fags, so we moved into town the next day into a totally over the top room. It looked almost like a Bolivian museum, but the main "draw" ha ha was the fireplace, we missed our South Street fireplace so much that we had to have a fire.

The fire was lovely if a bit smokey




The next day was dead and we noticed a load of skanky travellers who had not found their way home. Get a job, wasters, and most important of all, wash your bloody skanky hair.

We went to the Isla de Sol - the biggest island in the lake - which is massive by the way, reminded me of a holiday with my family and the Breeze's to a lake in the south of France that was so big it looked like the sea.

The Island is the Incas birth place of the sun. To be honest the Bolivians did not take advantage of their historic resource: there were no signs to tell you what you were looking at and even the sacrificial stone that we were quite looking forward to seeing had a silly man in a nightcap hat on selling stuff on top of it. Plus the boats to the island are some of the slowest boats in history.

Ho hum, the three hour walk, made a bit harder by the altitude 3800 metres, from the north of the island to the south was one of the nicest walks we have done. On the first beach we looked up and the Sun had a massive circular rainbow all the way around it, it was amazing and we had never seen anything like it! Definitely an omen from the sun's birthplace. Unfortunately the omen was that we should put some sun block on as we both got a bit burned, kinda appropriate really.

Solar Rainbow


The next day we took a bus to Puno, the town on the Peru side of the lake. This was the first time we had to walk across the no mans land on foot. El kept complaining that Peru looked like Bolivia, oh well you can´t please everyone.