En Route to La Paz: Sun Island


Copacabana, on the Bolivian side of lake Titicaca

From Puno it was just a short bus ride to the Bolivian border. The whole thing went pretty smoothly; we took the bus right up to the checkpoint, got stamped out of Peru, walked around 200m through the kind of no-man’s land between the two countries, queued again and got stamped into Bolivia, albeit for a meagre thirty days (I’d been rather optimistically hoping they would stamp me in for three months; but no, it appears I have to go to the migration office every month and beg for another month).

After the border our bus dropped us in Copacabana for a few hours, a small town on the Bolivian side of lake Titicaca. No floating islands here, instead we took a boat ride to Isla del sol (sun island).

Isla del sol has special significance for the Incas; it is where the Inca God of creation Viracocha raised himself out of the sea following a flood and created the sun. The island is chock-a-block with Inca ruins.

The option was there to stay the night and carry on to La Paz the next day. To be honest that is probably the better choice. The day trip was barely worth the effort; you only get to see a small part of the island and you spend most of the trip on the boat getting to it.IMG_8049


No cars on the island so these donkeys carry the supplies up the hill

However I’ve been feeling increasingly travel weary and eager to get to my next resting place, so decided to just plough on through.  It did break up the journey from Puno to La Paz a little. La Paz is only around another four hours by bus (making Copacabana quite do-able as a little weekend trip from La Paz).

2 replies »

  1. Hello Sarah

    Why do I want to burst into song when I read Copacabana and think of poor old Lola. I know it is not the same one 🙂 Those poor donkeys remind me of when I went to Lindos in Rhodes many moons ago and you could get a donkey to carry you around there. I never did as I thought the poor things had already suffered enough without carrying a very drunken me up all those cobbled steps. As always, safe travels my friend xx

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