Lake Titicaca & La Paz & Potosi

The plan was to go directly from Arequipa to Copacabana, a city at the Bolivian side of lake Titicaca (the highest navigatable lake in the world). However, we heard that there weren't many direct busses and even before we entered the bus terminal we were asked into a bus to Puno. For only 20 soles we had the best chairs you can have! You had a lot of space and you could flatten the seat almost entirely. So we went to Puno, still in Peru, instead of Copacabana.

At the Puno bus terminal we met Houssem, a French-Canadian guy, and Svenja, a German girl. Together with them we found a hostel and walked around the city. Since Ariana and I had already visited the floating islands, typical for Puno, years before, we decided to continue to Copacabana immediately the morning after. We crossed the border without any problems. The first afternoon in Copacabana we walked along the lake-side and we went with one of those little swan-boats with pedals on the lake. Around the main square was a parade of many Bolivian people in their traditional clothes, which was very nice to see. We also visited the church, and we were looking for a chapel with many candles, which we could remember was there, but we couldn't find it...

The next day we went with a boat to Isla del Sol, and guess who we met there: Houssem and Svenja! You meet the same people all the time ;). At Isla del Sol we made a nice walk around the island and we visited some of the ruins that can be found there.

After Copacabana we went to La Paz, still together with Svenja. In La Paz, we were almost chased out of one hostel. We had made a deal with the owner for 30 bolivianos, and when we had the key she started to say it was 35, and that we had to pay extra for using the bathroom. We didn't like that, so we wanted to go somewhere else, but she still wanted money because we 'made everything dirty'. We didn't, so we didn't pay, and she walked mad after us for a bit. She was really mad about nothing, cause we hadn't done anything wrong! We found another hostel and went to the witches' market. Here you can find lucky charms for all kinds of things, dead baby llamas, herbs, colored wax figures and much more. We also went to a Christmas market (there are many markets around La Paz) and to a viewpoint somewhere. In the evening we saw a christmas parade, apparently they start to introduce Christmas already quite early here!

Ariana and I visited the remains of a temple complex called Tiwanaku the next day. It was very nice to see! There were some nice gates and big stone statues of humans. Ariana lost her ticket halfway, but we could still visit everything we wanted to see.

In the afternoon we met Svenja again in the hostel and we decided to go to Sucre together. However, at the bus terminal we found that going to Potosi and then Sucre was much cheaper, so that's what we did. We arrived in Potosi at around 5 in the morning, so we had to walk around a closed and cold city for some time. Potosi is famous for its silver mines, so we visited those. We got an entire suit and a helmet with a light on it, we visited the miners' market, a refinery plant and finally the mines themselves. It was amazing to see those! We had to walk with our back bended for most of the time and the air was weird. We also saw some of the miners that still work there. Quite an experience! After that we walked around the city a bit more and we took the evening bus to Sucre. That's where we are now and from here on, we will visit the salt planes around Uyuni and make a tour through them to the border of Chile.

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