This morning to our surprise we were all picked up by rickshaws, very funny, and cycled to Puno port for a boat trip on lake Titicaca to the reed islands of Uros. A group of small floating islands on the lake made from reeds, each island having around four to five houses. The islands we visited, although this was denied by our guide, were set up especially for tourist visits to show how the indigenous Uros people live. There are a small number of Uros people who genuinely do still live on floating reed islands but they do not accept tourist visits. It was a really interesting morning.
Lake Titicaca is very impressive and the worlds largest high altitude lake standing at an altitude of 3810m and measuring 8400 square kilometres. 60% of it is in Peru and 40% in Bolivia.
After lunch at one of the lakeside restaurants we had a 200km drive around the shores of Lake Titicaca leaving Peru and entering Bolivia. At the border our passports were stamped for leaving Peru. We walked about 200m through 'no mans land' before crossing into Bolivia. On the Bolivian side we were kept waiting quite a while for the immigration officials to arrive at the office and stamp us in, we think it must have been lunch time! While we were waiting, in the 'no mans land' area, there was a local dance display being filmed, we don't know what it was about or for but it passed the time. Once we were all stamped in to Bolivia we continued a few more kilometres drive to another Lake Titicaca small lakeside town, Copacabana. Copacabana, Bolivia, has nothing in common with the famous Brazilian beach!
We checked into our hotel, Hotel Mirador, it was very basic but had fantastic views over the harbour and a lovely sunset. Nigel's has been to Copacabana and Bolivia a few times before so took me on a short guided tour of the small picturesque tourist town in the evening before we bumped into Sara, Rob, Ken and Haydee and went for dinner with them. Nigel was feeling much better, it was my turn to be unwell with a stomach bug!
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