We’ve been out of internet reception for a while so this post is over a week late, but we thought we ought put it in for the sake of recording an accurate chronology of events. Ill warn you now that is also covers one of the less exciting chapters of our travels, so ill forgive you for skipping over this one.

One of the biggest tourist attractions of both Peru and Bolivia is Lake Titicaca, a 200km long water body covering much of the Peru/Bolivia border. At an altitude of roughly 3800m, it is both the highest navigable lake, and the largest alpine lake in the world.

Lake Titicaca

Mostly due to convenience, we decided to visit the lake from the Bolivian side, on which Copacabana is probably the most popular tourist town. Copacabana is a small and beautifully situated town on a peninsula which juts out a few kilometers onto the lake. Unfortunately, Copacabana also turned out to be about the most poorly organized town I’ve had the pleasure of visiting, for example there is not a single ATM which takes foreign cards within about 100km of the town- so in a town which survives almost completely on tourism, we could only spend about 2/3 of the money we would have liked to because we ran out of cash.

Copacabana from a view point

The town was nice otherwise, and had a good selection of waterside walks. We took advantage of the relative remoteness of the area and set of some huge fireworks on the beach. On the second day, we went on a boat trip to ‘Isla del Sol´ which is a small island a three hour and freezing cold boat trip away from Copacabana. The island is the setting of the Inca creation myth, wherein the sun and the moon burst from a large rock on the top of the island. Supposedly adjacent to the cavities of the sun and the moon is a human face with a prominent tongue, though despite our best efforts none of us could see any semblance. The island also holds the very intact ruins of a small Inca village built around the 15th century AD, which Is surrounded by agricultural terraces, an Inca invention which greatly improved the farming potential of mountainous terrain. This allowed them to cultivate the potato, for example (supposedly the Irish stole it from the Andeans)

The highlight of our trip to Copacabana was the relaxed beach-side atmosphere, and our great hotel which was considerably enhanced by some tiny and adorable 8 week old kittens which would sneak into our room and fall asleep on our beds when we let our guard down (or just felt like kittens on our beds).

Kittens!

Cheesy tourist shot with alpacas