Copacabana, Bolivia (Molly)

It doesn't usually snow in Copacabana. However, when travelling I've learned to expect the unexpected.

As Nick wrote, we spent a lovely sunny day in Copacabana, including lounging in a hammock by the waterfront. It began clouding over in the evening, and at dinner I could see just see the occasional glow of faraway lightning over Nick's shoulder, through the open window. I noticed the patter of rain as we were falling asleep. 

The next thing I remember was waking up at about 2am to a sharp crack of lighting. It sounded quite close. Some steady rain ensued, and after a couple of hours of wakeful reading, I went back to bed. 

In the morning, the bedside lights wouldn't turn on, and there was no hot water in the shower. There was still a light rain outside, and as we looked over the houses and the beachfront, the light rain slowly but surely started to fall as snow. It was all the more beautiful for being unanticipated.

It turned out that the power outage wasn't just our room, but all of Copacabana and the surrounding islands. We were due to take a small boat out to Isla del Sol that afternoon, an island with some farming hamlets and basic accommodation. Throughout the morning, the snow thickened and the temperatures dropped. We began to wonder whether two days in an island in the middle of winter with no insulation, no heating and snow would be a good idea. We asked the matron of our hotel in broken Spanish whether she thought it was a good idea. She made a noise, sucking air in through her teeth, which was decipherable in any language.

The day before, we had made friends with the owner of a hotel next door, Cúpula. He kindly said that if it got too cold for us, we were welcome to come to the lounge of their hotel, where there was a roaring fire and hot tea. We decided to take him up on the offer while we mulled over our plans. We met a number of other like minded travellers who had decided to give the island a miss, and the comfort of the lounge and warmth of the tea made up our minds. Off to La Paz we went.

A quick visit to the 15th century Basilica de la Virgen de Candelaria before the bus

We managed to catch an afternoon bus, and as we went over the snow-covered hilltops very close to sheer cliffs, I clutched at Nick's hand more than once. We also had the interesting experience of watching our rickety bus cross a channel on an even more rickety boat:

We made it to the city, and I waited at an Internet cafe while Nick went around the corner to check out a hotel we had read about. After about an hour, when the cafe manager kindly told me they were closing, I was getting a bit worried. It turns out that finding a place was more difficult than expected, and on his return Nick had found the gates to the cafe plaza had shut. Happily reunited, we managed to go to a place recommended by the cafe owner, eat some 10pm ravioli and fall into bed.

Traveller tips: Hotel Utama was great, but if we had to do it over we would stay at Cúpula. Not only was the owner extremely friendly and the hotel lovely and warm; they also had a foundation to help local schools and other community projects. 

Arequipa to Lake Titicaca (Nick)

After an enjoyable couple of days in Arequipa, our next task was to make our way overland to Copacabana, on the Bolivian end of Lake Titicaca (the original Copacabana, after which the famous one is named). Although it was 450km by road, bus schedules meant we did it in two chunks: Arequipa to Puno (also on Titicaca, but at the Peruan end), and then Puno to Copacabana. After booking a bus (4M) through our hostel in Arequipa, we were picked up by a taxi in the morning and driven down the road to the bus stop (all part of the bus service). Somehow we managed to score seats right behind the driver, and so we were able to enjoy a lot of the high alpine scenery we passed through.

The road quickly started going up once we left Arequipa, and kept going for the next few hours. We wound our way through the dusty outskirts of the city, and then up through drier and drier scenery, punctuated by irrigated farmland and with snowcapped mountains looming far away in the distance. After a couple of hours we made our first stop- lunch at an isolated cafe near a village (possibly Pampa de Arrieros) that looked like something out of a Western movie set. After munching down our sandwiches (kindly provided by the bus company) and using the decidedly 3rd world toilets (not quite as much of a shock to the system to Molly as to me- she's spent time in Africa) we jumped back on the bus and continued gently ascending, as I eagerly followed our upwards progress via the occasional road sign. By this time we were over 4000m up and still climbing.

Mountains, desert, vicuñas (related to llamas), and small roadside shrines to crash victims marked our progress for the next few hours. Eventually we got to the point I had been waiting for- Crucero Alto, the highest point on the trip at 4558m. Our altitude pills (diamox) seemed to be doing the trick, and we noticed no ill effects at all. At least that was the case when we were sitting in the bus- when we stopped a couple of times to see flamingos and the beautiful lake Lagunillas it was a different story. Lesson learned: don't leap up and down for photos, or run back to the bus, at 4500m.

Running out of puff

Soon after Lagunillas, and as we began heading downhill again, darkness fell- so we didn't see much else until arriving in the cities of Juliaca and Puno, where the day's journey ended. It was hard to tell, but Puno seems a lot less prettified than the cities we had seen thus far. However, it's probably not a good idea to base one's opinion of a place on journeys to and from the bus station. We settled in to bed at the Las Pinas hostel, comfy enough despite the absence of a heater (it was getting pretty cold by this stage), and crashed.

The next morning we got up early and caught a taxi, booked for us by the very friendly and helpful hotel staff, back to the bus station. We had booked onward tickets around Lake Titicaca to Copacabana through the hotel staff the previous night, but when we arrived there was only one bus getting ready to go, from a different company. We were assured that our ticket was good for that bus, and given we had little other option we loaded our luggage and got on- and indeed it all seemed to be fine!

The trip around Lake Titicaca was quite interesting, hugging the coastline much of the time, and passing through small towns (with multiple hand-painted graffiti signs encouraging us to vote for "Alan"). Titicaca is a large lake, and it took a couple of hours to reach the Bolivian border at Yunguyo. At that point we had to get off the bus (which, slightly disconcertingly, drove across the border and out of sight), and queue up at the Peruvian border control. That took half an hour, after which we had to walk across the 50m of no-man's-land to queue up again at the Bolivian border office. Another half an hour and we were officially in Bolivia, without any money having changed hands, or any vaccinations having been checked (we had been warned to have everything in order as sometimes the guards like to see your vaccination records).

Luckily the bus reappeared, and we climbed back on and headed the last few kilometres to Copacabana. As we entered the town, the bus stopped and we had to pay a "town entry tax" of 2 Bolivianos to a friendly gentleman who came on board. Molly had read that this was a scam, but despite her strongly (but quietly) held objections, we paid up. The bus dropped us at the centre of town, up the hill from the lake front, and we negotiated the steep streets up to our accommodation at the Hotel Utama.

The hotel, on the inside, looked like something out of either retro Vegas or the communist era- a 3-storey, square atrium, with rooms on all sides, and a fountain in the middle on the ground floor. Our room was again comfortable and had a view down to the lake, although, like most hotels we encountered, the "hot" water in the shower was perhaps more accurately described as "tepid".

We spent the afternoon looking around the town, grabbing lunch, and considering options for our trip out to the Isla del Sol the next day. While the night in Puno had been cold, it was still pretty warm in the sun, so we spent some time enjoying the view down on the lakefront. In the evening we walked along the hill from the Utama to the highly recommended Cupola Hotel, only to find it was so highly recommended that the restaurant was completely booked out. The exceedingly friendly and helpful owner directed us down into town, to one of the next best places, La Orilla. A nice dinner later, we puffed our way back up the hill and into bed.