5 to 7 March 2016
Next stop on Christian and my journey together was Lake Titicaca, our last stop in Bolivia before crossing into Peru . The border runs through the lake. We took a bus to Copacabana, a small town on the Bolivian coast of the lake. The coach we had taken from La Paz had to be ferried across a little straight on a raft. Luckily we and the rest of the people on the coach went in a separate boat.
Copacabana lives off tourism and has lots of nice little bars, cafes, shops etc. Our favourite place was the food stalls at the beachfront, which served delicious fresh rainbow trout and cool beer. We had a wonderful sunset that evening and a rainbow over the lake the next morning. We packed the tent and left the camping place next to the beach where he had stayed for the night.
A boat took us to the Isla Del Sol. You can see from the pictures that we started off sitting on the top deck in t-shirts and then having to put our coats on and finally descending under deck because it got so cold in the fair wind. We got off at the stop at the north of the island and visited the ruins in that part. According to Inca legend, the island is the birthplace of the first man and woman of the Incas, created by the Son God who made the sun to rise again out of the Lake Titicaca after a great flood and a period of darkness.
We then made our way south across the island on the rocky old Inca trail called “Ruta Sagrada De La Eternidad Del Sol- The Holy Route of the Eternity of the Sun”. It did feel like a special mystical place. There is no motorised traffic, adding to the peaceful and serene atmosphere on the island. The high altitude from 3,800m to 4,100m above sea level meant that we walked slowly and also that we got a slight sunburn even after putting on sun lotion factor 50.
Arriving in Yumani on the southern tip of the island we found a beautiful place to sit in the sun and enjoy a cold beer with fantastic views of the island, the bays with the clear water and the terraces for agriculture, also a tradition going back to Inca times.
Continuing our round trip, we past the village of Challa and found a hostel at the beach which let us pitch up our tent for the night on their ground and served us dinner in their community room. The room had numerous photos from young people around the world who had done their volunteer service on the island, among them lots of Germans. I wonder if I had liked doing my volunteer year here. It is so remote and cut off from the rest of the world, but at the same time so beautiful and untouched.
We swam in the lake the next morning, which was cold, cold, cold. Christian took some water from the Lake to prepare breakfast, so pure is the quality – well, it did upset my stomach a bit… We ate our cereals and drank our coffee with lake view before making our way back to Cha’llapampa to catch the boat back to Copacabana to catch an overnight coach to Cusco, Peru.
Hiking to the pier, we had impressive views of the snowtopped mountains of the Cordillera Real. Waiting for the boat, we enjoyed another cool beer, looking over the lake and me hoping for a SC Freiburg win against RB Leipzig later that day (we won 2:1 thanks to Grifo and Niederlechner and got promoted to the First Bundesliga at the end of the season as did RB Leipzig).
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