When travelling by bus in Bolivia, it's never reassuring to see your bus driver cross himself in the Catholic way just before hitting a hairpin bend in the road. On the high road towards Lake Titicaca, our bus driver did this several times, which I was unfortunate enough to see. Maybe I'm stupid, but I reckon it would be safer to keep BOTH hands on the wheel on dangerous curves instead of appealing for divine providence - but that's South America for you.
We finally got to Lake Titicaca quite late but managed to find a nice hotel with views over the lake (in the daylight hours). Unfortunately our room lack towels, soap, and a light in the bathroom (despite our repeated requests to provide/fix said items), but we were only there for one night so we let it slide.
The next morning we jumped on a boat bound for Isla del Sol, the large island in the middle of Lake Titicaca famed as the birthplace of the Inca people - this is where they believed the sun god was born. The boat was packed with tourists and had a dinky-di little motor that propelled us at the grand speed of about a mile per hour. On the two-hour journey, Kris met Juan, a guy in his 20s who had grown up on Isla del Sol but was currently studying in La Paz. They got to talking, and Juan told Kris that he had had a girlfriend once, for a week - an English tourist who had stayed at the island a year or so ago. "She liked sex very much," Juan divulged. "Does your girlfriend like sex?"
"Umm... I'm not saying," was Kris' reply.
We got off at the north end of Isla del Sol to do the three-hour walk to the south end where you can stay in a hotel. We saw the famous rock where the Incas believed the sun god was born, and some old byzantine Inca ruins which looked amazing from the top of an adjacent hill. Despite Kris having a compass attached to his jacket (he bought it in Chile), we managed to get our north and south completely mixed up (we were so confident of our directions we didn't even bother consulting the compass), and instead of following the stream of tourists heading the other way, we trudged to the top of the aforementioned hill, believing we were heading in the right direction. It was only when we got to the 4000m peak that we realised we were heading to a completely uninhabited side of the island. Whoops. Still, we had a killer view of the lake, the green hamlets of Isla del Sol and all the little islands around us from our lonely vantage point which no other tourists saw. We then headed back down for the long walk to the south side - it was supposed to be only 3 hours long, but it ended up taking us 4. On the way we noticed lots of groves of eucalyptus trees - apparently they were introduced to the island a hundred or so years ago as they're particularly hardy and fast-growing trees and suited to growing in harsh, sandy environments at high altitude - go Aussies!
You know you've adjusted to high altitude when you can down a bottle of red at 4010m and still find your way back home in pitch darkness. We did this after a meal at this cute little out-of-the way restaurant, Las Velas, hidden in a grove of eucalyptus trees. I had homemade pasta and Kris had baked trucha (trout) - yet another plus of staying near the lake: finally, some good seafood in Bolivia! (Although we found out later that trout is actually an introduced species to Lake Titicaca and it's carnivorous - not sure what impact it has had on the natural environment...)
The next day we caught the morning boat back to Copacabana to see how the locals spend their holidays. As a landlocked nation (thanks to various wars with Chile and Peru and subsequent loss of important coastal land), Lake Titicaca is the closest Bolivians have to a beach resort. And on the main esplanade beside the lake, it's easy to believe that it's a beach, instead of a huge 9000 square kilometre lake (it's so big that Bolivia even has a navy - and yet the nation still lacks a land-based army). There's a fringe of yellow sand, swan and duck paddle boats for hire, ice-cream for sale and families playing along the shore.
We hiked up to the mountaintop lookout of Cerro Calvario (hundreds of stairs, absolutely exhausting in the high altitude - maybe we weren't so well-adjusted after all!) to see the sun set over the water.
The town of Copacabana itself is a bit of a hippie hangout - lots of tourists from Argentina and Chile seem to get stuck there and try to pay their way by selling jewellery and pictures to tourists from overseas. There's plenty of nice, cheap restaurants and bars with live music; on our last night we met up with Irish biker Feargal (whom we met in La Paz) and hung out at some local bars.
