Yesterday I travelled via Lake Titicaca to La Paz Bolivia. It was a loooooog day! And that after spending the whole night in the bus…

We arrived at Puno, on the shore of Lake Titicaca just in time to see the sunrise. We took a boat out to the Uros floating islands.

Speed boats they were not! In the boat we got an explanation about the lake, where the name came from, why the floating islands were built and how. We stopped at 2 of the islands. The first seemed to be where about 10 families were living. Here we got an explanation about life on the islands and how the families survive here.

Everything is made of reed of the island! The ground you walk on, the walls and the roofs if the houses and as such, everything has to be re-built on a regular basis! New reeds need to be added to the ground 3 times a month, while the houses need to be all but re-built 3 times a year! Then each island has something they call a “Mercedes Benz”, which, in reality, is a reed boat.

For 5 soles it was possible to hitch a ride in the Mercedes to the next island. Some of the group did this and much to the hilarity of the rest of use these reed boats are actually just pushed along by a speed boat!

The second island just seemed like a market. There were numerous stalls to buy souvenirs and it was possible to get a Lake Titicaca stamp in your passport.

Then it was back to dry land to continue, over the border into Bolivia, and onto a place called Copacabana. To be fair we didn´t do a whole let here, just had lunch and took another boat trip out to Isla del Sol (Sun Island). In hindsight, this wasn´t really worth the $10 I paid. Or maybe I was just too tired to appreciate it! I did get a cool Bolivian flag photo though!