Copacabana and Lake Titicaca

Copacabana and Lake Titicaca, Northern Bolivia (border with Peru)
12-13th June (just the Tues night!)

The travelling with a travel companion begins! Copacabana is the main town on the shores of Lake Titicaca and feels like it's only purpose is to house, feed and tour to the brim all the backpackers who stroll through on their way to/from Peru. Isla del Sol and Isla de la Luna are the sacred Inca islands in the southern end of the highest lake in the world. An early bus to Copacabana, and a top tip from a pal in La Paz to leave our big backpacks in storage overnight, made sure we had time to catch the 1.30pm bus to the south end of Isla del Sol. We completely underestimated the length of time it took to walk from the South end to the North but after a 4.5 hour hilly and sometimes quite steep walk through the middle of the island we made it to the north to see the Inca ruins, had some Jalapeno pringles whilst watching the sunset and had a 40 minute walk in the dark to the nearest village to go knocking on doors for 'dos camas por favour senorita!' The next morning we had to make the trip back down South, a 3 hour walk along the coast to get the boat back to Copacabana. We will never know if the man in the North lied to us about the tourist boat not running because from some points on our return walk we saw plenty of boats making the northerly trip. A quick shared pizza in a delicious Mexican restaurant and we legged it for the overnight bus to Cusco. First border crossing for Seanie!

SEANIE ON TITICACA: (150 Words Max)
We get into copacabana and realise its not really everything that barry manilow's song had promised. so we hopped the first boat out to isla del sol, thinking it'd be a nice easy stroll in the sun and we'd make it back in time to get the bus out of the place to puno for the floating islands. About, 2 minutes up the set of steps (which resembled a sheer rockface to my mind, laziness gets the better of me again) that lead you up to the first town we figured it was time to abandon that idea. Anyway we wandered in on this festival which we figured was just to celebrate our achievement of conquering the steps, apparently not seeing as had been going of for about a week and was due to continue for another week or two after.. typical south america they'll make a month long party out of anything! I think it was actually celebrating the discovery of pizza on the island... can't be sure tho, don't have the best spanish. So we walked for ages saw a nice inca ruin, ate some skittles, pringles and freddos while watching the sunset. All the rest is a tad mundane so I'll spare you the details. The end.

What's this? A little festival? We thought we were so lucky to have stumbled across this, little did we know they carried on all week. Probably all month - Peruvians love to party!

Sunday best!

It's not so obvious here, but these ladies have quite large bottoms.

Little baby sleeps through it all!

Before the procession entered I thought this crowd was a lot!

Jive time!

Enter marching band with dancing ladies - watch yo'self, shake yo ass, show me what you got!

Captive audience.

No roads on this island, this is the widest of the paths you'll see.. further down will be a series of rocks to clamber over and some steep steps. G'wan Donkey!

Token 'I'll walk ahead' photo. Check out the seriously impressive farming terraces that completely cover the island.
Fair play.

Some spot.

Hitting the north of the island, well over half way.

It's an Inuksuk! 

By chance we got the colours of the Bolivian flag in the palms of our hands whilst eating skittles, so we offered them to the Sun. Seemed like the appropriate thing to do on the Island of the Sun.

Inca ruins seems just like anything you'd find out West in Connemara.

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#1 FREDDO