Left La Paz six days ago for Copacabana and La Isla Del Sol. Now waiting for my bus back to La Paz, will pick up some left luggage at the Hostel and go to Oruro tomorrow.
The last entry was one week ago, time to catch up a bit.
Wednesday morning (23.1.) I was picked up by the bus heading for Copacabana at 8 a.m. After a beautiful busride of about three and a half hours through the altiplano we got to our destination. The landscape was quite different than the previous times I was here due to the rain season. Very green and colorful in contrast to the rather dry and brown landscape in winter.
During the busride I got to know two argentinian girls and a group of four chileans, nice folks, so we hooked up and arriving in Copacabana we booked into the same hostel. It was very low budget charging 10 Bolivianos (=1.30 USD) a night. It turned out the chilean guys were quite price senesitive, which I must admit am not. This trip is vacation and having a good time, so I don’t want and luckily don’t have to turn every centavo 🙂
However, we put down our stuff and headed out to find some good lunch at a good price 😉 Found a retaurant called the same as our Hostel: WAYRA. (Wink to my lovely niece.)
Us at lunch:
After that we decided to climb Mount Calvario, which might not seem to much of an extrodinary thing, unless you think about the altitude. Lake Titicaca is situated at 3800m and the Calvario is 3966m. Thus climbing up these 166m at this altiude is rather exhausting. With a little stop over on the way up with a beer, the effort was finally rewarded with a spectacular view from the top over Copacabana and the lake. Although I’ve been here several times, this enormous lake does
never cease to amaze me… no wonder they call it the “Lago Sagrado” (Sacred Lake).
View from the top of Mount Calvario:
Someone of the group had the great idea to climb down the “front”, which was definitely not very easy and I hardly think we saved any time, but sure it was unconventional. Not that the way down would be the problem!
In the evening of that day we finally ended up in the Bar and Disco WAYKYS, which was fun. We had a great time, although the guy running the place almost lost some good clients on us. He said he had to close down something after midnight, just to re-open a while later asking 10 Bolivianos to get in… what a rip-off. Well, we could convince him that this was not very friendly, since we already had spent quite some time and money in his joint.
And so we added some more to that… Ah, Chuflaysito.
Should come to an end here… Well we took the boat to La Isla del Sol the next day (24.1.) around 1.30 p.m. to get to the Island aroun 4 p.m.
More about that in Lake Titicaca, Part II. Will post that tomorrow morning before leaving for Oruro or later tonight sometime…
This entry was virtually written on the shores of Lake Titicaca, but due to time contraints and specially the problem of Copacabana having continuous power supply, or lack thereof, resulting in spontanous loss of written junk, it was posted after my arrival in La Paz… Sorry for that.
Hasta Luego