Not quite the morning that we planned on paper. We got done over by the bus company, or well, the tour operator who sold us the tickets for the bus. We had been promised that we would arrive in Copacabana no problem. This is just inside of Bolivia and on the way to La Paz. It turned out that our bus was headed to La Paz and not Copacabana. At 6am we were awoken and told we had to get off the bus in order to get to Copacabana. We hadn't crossed the border yet and there are two different areas to cross; one for Copacabana and one for La Paz. We got dropped off at the crossroads for them both. After much arguing with local taxi and combis operators we were able to negotiate to only paying a little bit to take us 15km to the border. Not ideal but things go out the window at 6am in South America. We met a solo French traveller who had similar issues except for the fact that she knew it was going to happen. We waited for about 10 minutes with her before the border control opened. In the mean time we got rid of our remaining Peruvian soles and instead received Bolivianos. It was a good job we did as we had to use them to take a combis from the border to Copacabana for 10km. Not far but out of walking distance with everything we had on us.
Copacabana we had heard mixed reviews of, some said it was boring, others said relaxing. It is very touristy, plenty of tour agencies and markets selling you souvenirs. What was slightly disappointing was the state of the beach. The boats by the beach all looked very nice, the pedalos looked of questionable quality. But the beach had so much litter. This seemed to be an issue almost everywhere so far. The lack of bins is ridiculous. How do you expect people to throw things away when there are no bins? Downward cycle.
Nevertheless the views of the insanely large and high altitude lake were pretty awesome. It looks like a sea, you have to take a moment to appreciate that it just isn't. We booked our boat ride to Isla del sol and proceeded to get aboard.
Isla del sol has no vehicles or any mode of transport other than boat. It made for quite strange viewing really. Almost unique in this way. We quickly found a hostel for the night to conk out at. Overviewing the lake is pretty good and slightly different to our usual apartments stayings.
A stroll to explore and try and see the sunset culminated in a delicious pizza with views for days. We had seen it described as something similar to a Greek island. This I can agree with in terms of looks, the only thing it lacks is the weather. Several layers, hats and gloves were needed to get by at night time. 4000m above sea level is pretty unforgiving to the lungs and skin. Nevertheless it was a place that had to be visited, even just for a night. Onto the rest of Bolivia soon.
