Lake Titikaka and into Bolivia

After spending the last couple of weeks at altitude we decided we might as well continue and headed from Cuzco to Puno, where Lake Titikaka is. Some say Lake Titikaka is the highest navigable lake in the world...Others say it´s not, there´s higher. Either way it´s very beautiful with bright blue/green waters.

We took a boat trip onto the lake to see the floating reed islands where people live. It´s amazing that they´re made out of reed and as the reeds rot with contact with the water they literally have to pick up their houses and put more reeds under every 15 days.

From Puno we crossed the border into Bolivia. This involved a bus and ferry journey across the lake. Our bus took one ´ferry´ and us another. How the bus made it over on the flat wooden ´ferry´ without toppling over was a marvel.

We stayed on the Bolivian side of Lake Titikaka for a night, in a town called Copacobana. Much more attractive and less poluted than the Peruvian side.

From here we went to La Paz, the crazy capital. It´s built in a canyon (and still at altitude) with houses on all the hills surrounding it.

Peruvians and Bolivians love their parades and demos. Nearly everyday we´ve seen them. There was a huge demo in La Paz, literally thousands and thousands of people marching through town, letting of fireworks and bangers. Ended up shut inside an internet cafe at one point and sounded like gun warfare outside. All noise though. It was a very peaceful demo!

It was explained to us in Brazil that ´compared to Brazil, Bolivia is for free´. Very true, it is sooo cheap here that we´re living it up, staying in posh hotels, eating out, drinking bottles of wine. It´s going to be hard when we get into Chile and the price goes up again.

We´re heading down Bolivia to visit the salt lakes, which sound very interesting, and still at altitude. When we return to sea level, we´re hoping we´re going to be very fit from all this altitude!

In case anyone´s interested we´ve been charting all our travels on a travel map on this blog, which shows exactly where we´ve been and when.