At 7am we headed on the bus to Copacabana, and stopped at the border for all the formalities. Luckily we aren’t American, it costs around $150 american dollars to enter Bolivia, because their president hates the American’s so much! Buy luckily it was free for us, so we arrived into Copacabana, checked into our hotel and proceeded to look around the town. It was a pretty run down, dirty town actually. I think the difference between Peru and Bolivia was amazing, Peru is such a lovely clean country, and the people are very proud people too, so it was a bit of a shock to see how dirty is was. We looked very out of place too...not because we were westerners but because we were clean! The town was full of rastas (you know Rastafarians) who were smelly, dirty and very unhygienic. I couldn’t believe how many of them were in this one small town! After doing some shopping and having some dinner we headed back to the hotel. This was the most disgusting, dirty and foul hotel i have ever stayed in, in my life! Different if it was a hostel, but it was a hotel and we paid $10 american dollars each to stay in this filthy run down shithole! It was run by children, i couldn’t find a manager or anyone who was actually older than i was to complain too. We had dirty sheets on our beds, stained dirty towels, a dirty bathroom and i had blood stains of my pillow, which was incidently a pillow filled with rags, not a real pillow and when i went to complain he couldn’t care less and gave me another pillowcase with stains on it. You could say i was not impressed at all!!
The breakfast was just as bad and i ate some stale bread with butter, and we checked out absolutely disgusted. Wait till i write a comment on tripadvisor.com!! So we headed off to the port for our boat ride to Isla del Sol. All in all, we were pretty disappointed, the boat ride took 2-2.5 hours not 1.5 which we were told and drove at about 5knots, no faster! The seats were wooden and extremely uncomfortable and were squished in like sardines. When we arrived, we were sort of chucked off the boat with no idea what to do?? Some people walked to the south island but we couldn’t because we had our bags with us, inteneding to stay a night on the island. So we walked around a bit and found a beautiful little beach where we sunbaked and relaxed until the boat was ready to depart to the south side of the island. While we were waiting we decided we wouldn’t stay on the island but head back to Puno that night on the 6pm bus. We got to the south with less than an hour before the boat was going to leave to head back to Copacabana, so we didn’t even have time to walk up to the settlement, because it was half hour up and half hour down. So overall we were pretty disappointed with the service from the people on the boat as well as the island itself. I mean the views we saw were pretty extraordinary but that was about it. So we caught the excruitatingly slow boat back into Copacabana and got on the bus back to Puno. When we arrived into Puno, the hotel staff were so happy to see us and it was no drama being a day early, so we arranged our boat trip for the Peruvian islands for the next day.
Emma headed to Arequipa and mum and I headed out to Uros and Taquile islands for the day. It was 100% better than the Bolivian side, the boat, the service and the islands. The boat was fast and it had bus seats installed so it was comfortable! First off we headed to Uros or the floating islands, which are quite close, about half hour from Puno. It was amazing, there are 40 islands that are made entirely from reeds and anchored using the roots of the reeds, and hundreds of people live on these islands, and speak mainly Amayra, which is a traditional language originating from Bolivia. Mum bought a beautiful handmade rug thing for the coffee table, which has the two most important gods on it, from the Inka times, Pachamama and Pachatata (mother and father earth). It was great and amazing to see that these people live out here on these small reed islands!
We then headed off on a 2 hour boat ride to Taquile island, which was amazing, its like a island lost in time. They speak Quechua, which is the traditional language of Peru from the highlands, and they live like they are still in the 1920’s. It is very old fashioned, even down to marriage and courting, its very traditional. The view was absolutely amazing, and the communities on this island was beautiful, the people are also very lovely. We had a lovely lunch of local trout and a chat and took some more photos before heading back to the boat for the ride back to Puno. Although there wasn’t many ruins or anything on these islands, unlike in Bolivia where the tourist attraction is the ruins, it was the view and the people that made it amazing. We had a wonderful day and thought it was definitely worth while.
Mum wasn’t well so we had an early night to get ready for our bus trip to Cusco, where we will spend 2 nights before we fly out to Lima and mum flies home to Australia!! For breakfast at the hotel, the staffg surprised mum with a present for mothers day! They came into the dining room and asked mum to stand and presented her with a beautiful purple alpaca scarf and said ‘happy mothers day mum’!! It was so adorable! They gave her a hug and also gave us a little pin with dolls on it for our shirts. They were so lovely and the scarf looks so nice on mum and being purple she will wear it to the dockers games!!
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