Lake Titicaca, Sun and Moon Islands

Matt on the edge of Peru and Bolivia
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We left Cusco by bus early in the morning on Cruz del Sur for Puno.  From Puno we had arranged a night at a hotel and to be picked up by Crillon Tours for our journey across Lake Titicaca and into Bolivia.

The most common route is to get the bus from Puno to La Paz which involved a ferry crossing.  However we had done quite a few buses and felt like we wanted to see Titicaca more closely.  So we splashed out a bit extra for an organised tour and stay on the Lake involving a night on the Sun Island and a trip to the Moon island.  This was to take place over 2 days with us finally being deposited at our hotel in La Paz.  This would cut out us having to piece together our jopurney with multiple bus trips and allow us to relax!  We had also met various people on the way to date that gave either horrific or amazinf stories about Bolivia and La Paz.  So having it all arranged and sorted beforehand appealed to us.

the border
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After our stop over at the La Hacienda hotel in Puno we were picked up by the tour agency and transferred to the Bolivian border.  We rode along in a modern leather seated town car with another couple from South Africa.  We stopped a couple of times to see a local town of Juli and listened to our Peruvian guide describe the Aymara communities that policed and managed themseleves.  At the border we got our passports stamped and changed some cash into Boliviano´s.  We were then handed off to our Bolivian tour guides (Raul and Guido) who were to look after us.  From the border we were driven the short distance into Copacabana and walked throught the town market as well as visiting the church to see the statue of the Virgin Mary who protected the town from tsunami and bad weather from the Lake.  Copacabana was a thriving town as it was gearing up for carnival as well as the stalls that sold flowers and blessing materials for the various buses and cars that travel in Bolivia.  It is custom for vehicles to be blessed with alcohol and flowers to ensure a safe journey!  Something we understood from our transfer from Puno and into Bolivia where we had seen a bus crash into a car and another car recently rolled over into the fields next to the road!

Blessing buses for a safe journey
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At Copacabana we also saw the local presence of the Bolvivian Navy.  An intimidating 2 rowing boats and a jeep on the dock!  Next to these we boarded our Hydrofoil and shot off to the Moon Island about 20 minutes away.

At the Moon Island we were greeted by local women and children.  Here no men or teenagers live due to the lack of facilties and schools.  These people move to the mainland or the Sun Island to work within the families local businesses.  At the island we climbed some steps and visited the remains of the Moon temple were the Incas used to sacrifice 20 - 30 girls a month.  Quite a strange feeling to visit such a place which is now very peaceful and relatively small.  It was also here the temple was addressed with large amounts of gold which was later seized by the Spanish Invasion.

our first taste of the formidable Bolivian Navy
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We then took the hydrofoil to the Sun Island here we were dropped off with Raul to walk to the hotel for lunch.  We were met by a local family and a llama to carry our hand luggage.  We had a good walk around part of the island looking at some of the local ruins and temples and then checked into the hotel.  It was a great hotel where we were the only guests in the whole place.  We were given a great room in a wooden tower with large patio windows that opened out onto a balcony and looked across the lake.  We also enjoyed sometime on one of the grass platforms sitting in handcrafted seats of local wood looking out across the lake to the northern mountain ranges of Bolivia.  We were later told by Raul that Jim Carrey and another celeb I can´t remember the name had visited the Sun Island recently.  They had turned up in a helicopter and were booked into the hotel.  They had hired a number of the hydrofoils and Raul suggested that they had been out on the Hydrofoils taking cocaine for most of the day.  They then got spooked thinking that the press were around and immdieately got back on the helicopter and returned to Lima and then the US!  We were not totally convinced by this but Raul was pretty sure...

Isla del Sol, Lake Titicaca
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That evening Raul took us out for a walk to the top of the island and for the sunset across the lake.  We then returned for a good dinner at the hotel.  The next day it was pretty wet with heavy rain.  We had arranged to do a trek to the other side of the island to see some more ruins but the rain was pretty intense.  We took a long breakfast and Raul suggested we hire a boat and visit a native village across the lake on a remote part of the mainland.  Raul had taken a BBC crew there last season to show them some of the more original villages in Bolivia, apparently this village will appear in a BBC destinations ´must visit´book at some point.  We hired a local boat and pilot and took the boat across.  Our pilot then walked with us to the local village where we saw most of the locals going about their business of mainly farming and tending to animals.  It was more modern than we had expected but nonetheless an interesting view into Bolivia life.  We also visited the local school, where we gave gifts of school books and colouring pens.  This was suggested as the appropriate thing to do to pay respect to the village for receiving us as well as being a constructive gift rather than sweets for kids who have no dental care.

Matt looking out from the isla del sol
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In the afternoon after retunring and some sunbathing on the grass terraces, we were picked up by the hydrofoil. On the way we stopped at a local project to maintain native way of life of the Iquitos who built and lived on floating islands of reeds.  This way of life had emerged as the Lake shores had been a dangerous life due to constant warring between tribes on the lake.  The floating island was small and held only a few houses we had a small tour of island which smelt pretty bad due to the rotting of the reeds, this required the natives to constantly renew the floating island with new reeds, a new island would often take a year to build.  We reached the mainland after passing the ferries taking across buses to the mainland, these ferries looked pretty small with busses on! Good news is that the bus and passengers travel separately for safety, something that is not always the case in Bolivia!

Our llama bag carrier
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Our private bus transfer then took us to our hotel in La Paz, on the way we passed through El Alto, one the worlds newest cities.  This city still had no sewerage system and looked a pretty tough place to live in.  Apparently work had started on providing the normal facilties you would expect in a city but this had started 7 years ago and not much progress was visible.  We were also told of the main market on the weekend which sold everything from aircraft to tigers and other exotic animals.  It was very much a place to only take the clothes on your back and your cash only.  (no jewellery, bags etc as you would probably lose them to local theives and pickpockets!!)  After an interesting drive and descent into La Paz at night we arrived at out hotel. We were to stay for 4-5 nights.