Birth Place of the Sun and the Moon

Pathetic packed lunch

Once we were chugging our way out to sea, very very slowly as it happened, we had a peek into our packed lunches to see what we had to supplement our meagre breakfast. It was terrible: the “fruit” we had been expecting was actually just a sugary fruity drink like a froot shoot and the rest of it hardly made up a meal substantial enough for what we ha paid. This was the last straw for me and South American food: it is awful; the only thing to recommend about it is the steak in Argentina, but then it's just meat meat meat, which gets rather tedious. Mostly the food is fried rubbish; I think the influence of their fastfood-loving neighbour to the North has destroyed any idea of a traditional cuisine. Or maybe the food has always been terrible.

Lazy captain

Pathetic engines

The boat took an incredible amount of time. Instead of having a decent-sized on-board engine and large propeller attached to the hull, they were powering this passenger boat, at least the size of a small fishing boat, with two outboard motors, presumably after realising that one wasn't going to do it.

Incan terracing

On the trail

Finally we got to the island, in Inca mythology as the birth place of the Sun and the Moon, it was an extremely important location to them. We paid for our ticket which, they told us, would cover entry to the museum, the ruins, and todo, then we set off on the path towards the ruins. On the way we passed Puma Rock, which in Quechua is titi kala, after which the lake is probably named. We passed a table, reportedly used for sacrifices. The island was very dry, though very pretty with the Incan terracing and surrounded by clear blue water.

Looking back at the port

"Sacrificial" table

Funny angled islet

When we first approached the ruins, it just looked like a few uninteresting stone houses and I felt the disappointment of Tilcara rising all over again, but when we got closer I realised that these houses were linked into other houses further down the slope, in an interconnecting network of tunnels and passageways. It must have been quite a busy little village at one time, but how absent privacy must have been, when every house is connected directly to several neighbours; in effect is was really just one big building with a large complex of rooms. Much more interesting than the Tilcara ruins an in much better condition, though these ruins are probably a few hundred years more recent.

Ruins

Joanne sitting in ruins

After the ruins we decided we would walk the seven kilometres to the South end of the Island rather than retuning to the port to get a lift there in the boat. The guide book said it was the only way to truly appreciate the island and we thought we needed a bit of exercise to get us in training for Machu Picchu, which was now only a few days away. It was hot and the altitude meant that we found it quite difficult (the summit of the island is over 4000 metres above sea level), so I took out the bag of coca leaves I had bought on the Salar de Uyuni trip and started chewing. Ever few hundred metres, a few people would be standing with a bundle of tickets, claiming that we needed to pay 5 Bolivianos to continue down the path; no we don't I explained, our ticket is for todo, but none of them cared, so we just told them that we didn't have any money and kept walking. I was fairly sure it was a scam, but I wasn't sure until we passed a South American guy who was waving away the ticket vendors and shouting something at them in a very irritated voice. Did you pay them? he asked and said he was very pleased when we told him no. We really didn't have enough money for all the tickets, since we were leaving Bolivia that day and had been running our funds down. We could have bought a few, but we needed money for a beer when we got to the end!

Modern stone work

The long path ahead

The interior of the island

Inca Steps from top

Joanne keeping the sun off

The island had been getting progressively more green as we headed South, until the end of the walk where it was very green and much less dry-looking than the North. There was much more development at this end of the island too, and the highlight seems to be Incan Steps up from the harbour to the plateau of the island. We rewarded ourselves with the beer we had been waiting for, and sat on the grass and chatted to an Irish couple from the same boat. They had paid every one of the rip-off 5Bs tickets, though now they said “I knew it! I knew it was a scam!”.

Inca Steps from bottom

Last chance to photo Bolivian ladies

Joanne cold

On the way back we had to endure the super-slow boat even longer than necessary because they stopped off at a “floating reed island”. We had heard about these islands on the Bolivian side, but hadn't realised our tour included it; the genuine reed islands are on the Peruvian side, and we knew that these ones were fake, recently constructed for tourists. They were charging 2Bs per person to get off the boat and wander around, but the only people who did were two Bolivian ladies. You can tell Bolivian ladies by the fact that they all wear unusual hats, like tall bowler hats. Nobody else seemed interested; presumably everyone else knew they weren't the real thing.

Silly floating "reed" islands

Bolivian ladies the only one to get off

Copacabana

Back in town, we had a few hours to wait for the bus and only enough money for one more beer. Everyone around us was ordering food and it looked like the food there was really good, especially the pizzas some people near us ordered. I called the waiter over and asked if they would take US Dollars, since we still had some left over, but he told us that they would accept Dollars, but only on bills over a certain amount that just two people could not easily have spent, and we certainly didn't want to. We were starving though, so not long before our bus was leaving, after we had paid our bill and not long after the people with the pizzas had left, we made a quick exit, passing the table where the girl had left half of her pizza untouched, and I lifted two of the large pieces off her plate. It was only one piece each, but we reckoned it would be enough to keep starvation at bay until we arrived in Puno anyway.

The border crossing into Peru, not long after leaving Copacabana, was nice and easy, but someone got on the bus at the border who had the smelliest feet I've encountered since India, and we had to move one row back to avoid vomiting. We would have moved further back, but the rest of the bus was full, because even where we were it was still slightly stomach-churning. I love bus travel.

written by  The Happy Couple on November 2, 2009 from Isla del Sol, Bolivia
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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