Copacabana (BOL)

Buses from La Paz to Copacabana on Lake Titicaca run several times a day and the journey takes about 4 hours. Actually only three - but the bus and passengers have to separately cross a small part of the lake because the overland route would be much longer. And with Bolivian calmness, it can sometimes take an hour.

So I arrived in Copacabana in the evening and found a hostel in the Lonely Planet guide. However, there are also at least two hostels on every street corner here, so an unprepared arrival wouldn't have been so bad.

On the first day, I explored the town and then naively decided to hike up the city mountain for the view. According to the hostel information, it should only take 30 minutes - but that probably applies to locals. So us tourists slowly struggled up the path paved with loose stones and at an altitude of 4000m, we reached our limits at times. After an hour, however, I made it and could enjoy the view of the country, city, and lake. In the end, it was worth it.

In the morning of the second day, I was supposed to go to Isla del Sol, an island in Lake Titicaca. However, there are some political problems in this regard. Since tourists populate the north and south of the island and only the harbor is at the center of the island, the local residents there feel financially disadvantaged. The conflict has now escalated to the point where only one travel agency is allowed to visit the harbor twice a day, and thus only a fraction of tourists are on the island.

However, the 8:30 am tour literally got washed out due to a thunderstorm, and since I'm already traveling to Cusco in the evening, the 1:30 pm departure wasn't an option for me.

So I had a relaxed morning before the sun came out around noon, and I explored the coast. It almost felt like being at the beach, if you ignore the missing 15 degrees. And now I'm writing the blog before embarking on an 11-hour journey to Cusco, Peru - with the ultimate goal of visiting Machu Picchu!

Saludos,

Kai