Our last stop in Bolivia was Copacabana on Lake Titicaca. We had no love for the town itself. Maybe this was because we stayed on what was essentially a construction site (it didn’t look like that on Airbnb!) featuring ice cold showers and an Alsatian with anger management issues. Or maybe it was because the charmless town was backpacking at its most dire – crap food, crap service, crap coffee, crap music blasting out everywhere…The one interesting thing that happens in the town is the vehicle blessing ceremony. Here’s a snap of a recently anointed 4×4 that we took whilst our bus driver stopped to down a beer with his mates by the roadside just before driving the scary clifftop bit. Look it’s got a little hat on and everything!
Anyway, we did LOVE Isla del Sol so our trip to Copacabana was far from a waste. First you take a snail’s pace ferry from Crapacabana across Lake Titicaca during which your phone will freak out and think it’s in Peru, then Bolivia, then Peru again…it makes keeping track of the time in order to catch the last ferry back from the island a real hoot as the time zones change repeatedly!
Isla del Sol is an ethereal nugget of loveliness sitting pretty in the middle of shimmering Lake Titicaca. This rocky wonder is a little over ten miles long, dotted with Incan ruins and traversed by a network of well-worn trails (but no roads which means…no cars!) Whilst a simmering local dispute about tourist revenues means the northernmost paths are off limits, there’s still plenty of quaintness to explore in the five or so hours most people spend here before heading back to the mainland.
It begins… 
Mullet-sporting friend 
El Dunstan 
A couple of caveats. You’d better have spent some time at altitude already and you’d better not get too annoyed at your own body for objecting to the conditions a bit. For Isla del Sol’s lowest point is 3800m and in order to really see anything except the harbour you’ll need to immediately climb a couple of hundred metres more. If you want to hike to the highest point, that’s at 4100m. We’d had several weeks at high altitude beforehand but still had headaches (that ibuprofen dealt with) and were stopping comically frequently and panting a bit like the Airbnb hound anticipating fresh unsuspecting backpackers when doing the very uphill bits.
So apart from laugh at your own body’s feebleness in the face of thin, thin air, what is there to do on the island? Well the setting is stunning. The island isn’t very wide so at most points wherever you are standing you can see the calm azure waters of the lake and watch the weird way the wind sculpts the surface, man. You can wander around checking out what people are growing in their gardens – mostly veggies and pretty flowers – and most of the islanders are pretty friendly so you can try out your Spanish. Neither of us really eat trout in the UK (who does??) but as it’s a speciality around Lake Titicaca we thought we really should try it…AND IT WAS AMAZING! A pretty strong flavour, perfectly juicy and served simply with some veg grown on the island. Devoured at a plastic table overlooking the lake, this was the highlight of the day and probably cost a couple of quid.
Possibly trout of our minds at this point (lol) we decided to hike to the highest point which was a bit of a slog but worth it for the best views we had all day. There was something undeniably peaceful about being surrounded by a vast expanse of calm blue water and none of the usual irksome urban noises.
Some fellow travellers had taken their pursuit of zen to the next level and were perched improbably high up inside the farthest away of the Incan ruins, smoking something that may or may not have been grown on the island. As seems to happen on a daily basis out here, D made friends with a stray dog who followed us all the way to the top, urinating ad hoc on many of the things we wanted to photograph.
After a bit more rummaging around and trying to imagine what it would be like to actually live in this place (verdict: not like East Dulwich) we took the 4pm ferry back to Jokeacabana, soaking up some rays on the top deck (read: repeatedly slathering our pasty skin with sun cream to avoid lobsterifying instantaneously at such high altitude). We moved on the next day to Arequipa in Peru from where we were going to head off on a 3 day, 2 night “challenging” trek of the Colca Canyon. We survived it and it deserves its own backdated blog post which we may get around to writing before we head back to the UK (via Spain…just because!)
South American stories 