So after our last post Caro and I both got sick within a day of one another (not very sick, just enough to have to each spend a day in bed) and by the time we were better we were sick of La Paz and didn´t want to wait around another couple of days getting our strength back and getting everything sorted out again, so we didn´t go hiking on the Choro trail. This is still a source of some misery to me.
However, we went to Copacabana on Lake Titicaca instead and that was lovely.
We caught a minibus (another one) from La Paz. After about two hours´ driving, the minibus stopped next to Lake Titicaca and the rest of the bus got out and wandered off. ¨They must all be getting off at this town,¨ we thought, remaining on the bus. Not so. Two armed sailors (Bolivia has a Navy, and yet not a coastline) wandered up to our bus and indicated that we should get out. After a little bantering in Spanish we established that they wanted us to catch a ¨ferry¨ (a small rickety motorboat, through the wooden boards of which we could see water below) to the other side of the lake, and that the minibus would meet us over there. ¨Um... how?¨ we wondered. The mystery was soon solved when we saw the minibus drive onto a similarly rickety wooden barge. We all made it across okay.
Copacabana in Bolivia is not the Copacabana that the song is about... that place is in Brazil. Nevertheless it´s a fairly peaceful town on the bank of what appears to be an ocean but is actually high-altitude Lake Titicaca.
There is an island in this lake, called Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) which most people catch a ferry to from Copacabana. However since we missed the Choro trek, Caro and I and our new friend Martin (from Germany, who we met on the minibus from La Paz) decided to hike 17 kilometers to another town on the edge of the peninsula, and hire a motorboat from there to take us to the island.
The trek was beautiful; it went along the shoreline of Lake Titicaca most of the way, past all these little farming villages with donkeys and llamas and pigs and cows and sheep and dogs gazing at us from beside the dirt road.
Halfway along we saw a ¨floating island¨. Way back in the day, some folk in Bolivia and Peru used to live on floating islands built from reeds, fishing for trout all day. Supposedly some people still live like this but it is difficult to know whether this is true or not because all the ¨floating islands¨ advertised by tour companies are now just (quite literally) built for tourists. But since we were walking past, we went to have a look anyway. It was kind of cool, I guess. They were using empty plastic drink bottles, tied together, to support the raft, as I could see through the reed fronds hanging down. I don´t think that´s quite traditional but I suppose it´s pretty sensible. The guy running us, in answer to Martin´s question, said that he lived there because ¨there is great fresh fish and the tourists come to see the raft¨. We appreciated his honesty.
Catching a little motorboat from the end of the peninsula was pretty fun - again, we could see the water through the wooden planks, but we made it across okay. Our driver (who saw us walking along the road and ran out to offer the services of his boat) dropped us at the island, not at the usual landing bay, but at what appeared to be a small cliff. ¨There is a little path up there,¨ he told us, ¨You can walk to the town from there. Twenty minutes.¨
Forty hard-slog minutes later, we did in fact reach the town. And then we had the new dilemma of trying to find something to eat, exhausted after hiking all day (hiking at altitude is kind of tough by the way) because everything was closed - the locals were having a fiesta. This means they were all down at the plaza in their Sunday suits (men) and shiny party dresses (women), swigging from beer bottles and dancing around drunkenly. But we found an open restaurant eventually and boy howdy was it good to eat!
My bed had a window at the end of it. Miraculously, I somehow awoke in time to watch the sun rise over the lake without getting out of bed. It was pretty great.
We walked around Isla del Sol a bit the next day and then caught a ferry ¨back to Copacabana¨. This meant, we discovered, first being deposited at the other end of the island for an hour and a half, and being forced to pay 5 Bolivianos to get off the boat. Not that good of a time for Caro and I, since we were once again starving (and badly needed lunch), but also because we had run out of cash. There is no ATM on the island, obviously, but what we didn´t realise before we left La Paz is that there is no ATM on Copacabana either. We knew we were going to be pushing it with money, but after having to pay that 5Bs we had to borrow money from Martin for lunch.
It would be okay, we reckoned, because we´d be back to Copacabana before 5pm and we could get a cash advance from the bank. Well, after this ¨now you have an hour and a half to wait on the island¨ that we were not expecting from the ferry, we did not get back to Copacabana until after 5pm and the bank was shut. It did not open again until 2.30pm the next day.
Caro and I spent the intervening time living on a few emergency US dollars hidden in Caro´s pack, about $5 worth of Chilean currency I was planning on taking back to Australia as a souvenier (changed for a pretty poor rate, since we were miles from Chile), and some torn Bolivian bank notes that we´d been hoarding for a while (we begged the girl at our hostel for some sticky tape to fix them up again - bingo, another 40 Bolivianos! magic!)
Anyway, the bank eventually opened, I eventually got through the inevitably huge queue and we eventually got enough money to pay for our accomodation and leave town!
After a slightly hellish night bus and bording crossing we are now in Arequipa, Peru. Hurray! It is already clearly richer than Bolivia here, which for some reason feels really strange. For example:
- People selling empanadas (yummm) and fruit juice (yummm) and magazines (muy interesante!) are selling them from shops, rather than little trolleys on the street;
- I haven´t seen any little old ladies in traditional dress selling piles of mandarins/bananas/eggs laid out on cloth on the road;
- Haven´t (yet) seen any super-dodgy looking markets selling super-dodgy looking food;
- Even the advertisements on television look richer!!
And all kinds of other small things. Hell, even the beggars look richer! Also, people are taller and more European-looking. Some of them are taller than us!! Wiieerd.
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