From Peru, we took a 9 hour
overnight bus which dropped us off in the middle of nowhere, where we then got
into a small van which took us to the Bolivian border, went through customs and
then got into an even smaller van where we were all crunched in together which
dropped us off in Copacabana. (And that's something that we found extremely common in Bolivia...everything was really small for us as seen below.)
Although we were really lucky with the weather as it was beautiful throughout our travels, we traveled throughout
Peru and Bolivia during their rainy season (and therefore off season). Although we didn't have any specific travel plans but rather decided to go with the flow of things, upon arriving to Copacabana we had decided to take a ferry
that afternoon over to Isla del Sol where we would then spend the next couple
nights on the island, yet soon after finding out that the next day was the Bolivian
Census (which happens once every 10 years…lucky us) and that no one is allowed to
leave their house/hotel/hostel on Census day as they literally go to all off
the houses and count everybody, we decided to just relax and stay on
Copacabana, rather than be stuck on an island where we weren’t even sure if we
could get water. So we found a really nice room for 4 people with a beautiful
lakeside view on the mountain, in a resort-like hostile called Las Olas, which is run by a
German man who gave us a discount for the rooms ($50 a night for all of us, so
$12 each) since Gabriel spoke German to him as he is from a Swiss-German province. (In fact, the top picture of this blog entry is a panoramic shot of the view from outside our room.) This was
a great place to finally relax after constantly being on the go for the last
week in Peru. The weather was beautiful. We sat in the hammocks outside in the
day (although because the altitude was soooo high…even higher than Cuzco, Machu
Picchu and Peru, it is very important to put on sunscreen, as John soon found out
after laying out for 30 minutes, the sun BURNS you quite fast here) and watched beautiful thunderstorms on the other side of the lake while
drinking some excellent red wine by night.
The day after the census, we took
the 8:30am ferry over to the northern part of Isla del Sol to hike 6.2 miles
across the island to the southern part. The island was cool to see and the
ferry ride was absolutely beautiful, but I’m really glad we stayed on
Copacabana instead of Isla del Sol as our resort in Copacabana was awesome (and
had a great restaurant where we ate for thanksgiving dinner), whereas Isla de Sol was
really desert-like with not much on it and was something you can do/enjoy in a
day. At 3:30pm we took the ferry from the Southern part of the island back to
Copacabana where we then took a bus at 6:30pm to La Paz.
La Paz is a really cool city,
especially to drive into as it is just a huge city placed randomly between a
bunch of enormous mountains. Of all the cities I went to in South America, La
Paz was definitely the craziest. It's packed with people, has small streets that 1 car can barely fit through, contains a bunch of low hanging wires that power the cable cars and there are people randomly dressed up in zebra costumes at all the traffic lights in attempt to force cars to respect traffic lights (because driving IS that bad down there). It is actually hilarious because as soon as the lights turn red, the zebra people jump in front of the buses to stop them and the government pays them to do this. Everything seemed so disorganized and
random but even amongst that I really enjoyed La Paz and wish we had more time
there. We were only going to be in La Paz for one day to catch a
bus connection at 7pm to Uyuni where the Salt Flats are. My original Plan was to bike El Camino del Muerto (the Road of Death), yet because everyone was stuck due the census in Bolivia, all the 9pm cama buses to Uyuni filled up quickly, so we ended up being stuck with a
semi-cama bus with no service that left at 7pm. Therefore, I
couldn’t take the risk of missing it so I did not bike the road of death and
instead roamed the city for the day. Other than the traffic zebras, the highlight of the day was watching Skyfall, the new James Bond movie at a mall in La Paz for $3. Can't get better than that.
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