Copa....Copacabana & Lake Titicaca

No it's not the place from the song but rather a small town situated in Bolivia on the shores of Lake Titicaca (still can't say that out loud without smiling)

Getting to Copacabana was a bit of a trial, we left Arequipa at 8:30am after paying three times too much for an ordinary bus, then arrived at Puno right on 2:30pm stuffed around for a bit totally unaware that the last bus for Copacabana leaves at 2:30pm...finally got to the counter informed them we wanted to get to Copacabana, there was a couple of minutes of exited chatter by the staff before we were bundled into a taxi and took off after the bus that had left 15 minutes ago.  Thanks to our taxi drivers rally driving ability and the rallyability of his tiny little cab we caught the bus in no time and a couple of hours later and a painless border crossing we were into Bolivia.

First glimpse of Lake Titicaca (hehe) is quite a shock...it is huge, in fact we spent our whole time in Copacabana under the impression that we were looking at one of the biggest lakes in the world, a quick Google search later we were somewhat disillusioned to find that it only scrapes into the top 20, although claiming the red sea at no.1 as a lake is cheating in my opinion, also surprisingly Lake Eppalock did not rate a mention....maybe due to the current water shortage in Bendigo I should have checked worlds biggest craters.

Just did a quick search and it turns out Lake Titicaca is actually the world highest lake navigable to large vessels at 3800m.....at least that's something.

Spent the first couple of days in Copacabana relaxing and recovering from the "relaxing" in Arequipa, this mostly involved sleeping in, wandering around town and eating copious amounts of the local trout.  After that myself, Jo and Jules (a kiwi chick we had been traveling with) decided to tackle Isla del Sol (literally Island of the sun) which involved a two hour boat ride to the North of the island.  After that  we did a tour of a few inca sights then walked for two or so hours to the very south of the island before getting picked up by the boat and heading back to Copacabana.  The Island was actually really good with some elevated points that afford an amazing view of Lake Titicaca.

We also climbed a nearby hill in Copacabana that had the stations of the cross on it, unfortunately we scrambled up the front face of the hill (Jo and Jules stopping half way due to altitude problems) only to get to the top and discover there was some great big bloody steps just around the corner!...but the view was worth it and managed to take some arty photos of the sunset on the lake with the crosses in the foreground which came out well.  In fact Copacabana and Lake Titicaca has provided some of the best sunsets we have seen in our short and sheltered lives.

Three days was sufficient to unwind in this very cruisy town so we decided to head to La Paz a couple of days early.