Arequipa to Copacabana

Tuesday 15th April
Spent a LOOONG time on buses today travelling from Arequipa to Copacabana (Bolivia).

Booked the bus with Cruz del Sur (the flash company) for S/40 each (about NZ$15) for a six hour bus ride to Puno. The trip was pretty uneventful - I slept a bit and Andrew read and stuff.

We arrived in Puno at 3pm and thought we were going to have to catch about 3 different collectivos (local vans, usually stuffed FULL with people) to get to Copacabana. But, we had a lucky break as the 2:30pm bus to Copacabana hadn't left yet as it didn't have enough people (this is quite common, the bus will hang around until it has enough people to make the journey profitable). So we managed to jump on that bus (and it was a tourist one at that) and left about 3:30pm for the 3.5hr journey to Copacabana.

We crossed our first ever land border between Peru and Bolivia with no problems (it was surprisingly easy in fact, despite some of the stories we had heard). Then continued on for 10km to Copacabana and arrived just after 7pm. On the way through we saw the most spectacular sunset - the sky was such a fab mix of red, pink and orange. I tried to take some photos from the moving bus, but there wasn't enough light, so I have some impressionistic sunset photos.

Once in Copacabana we wandered around for a bit and found a hostal - it is a pretty quite place, and mainly just a tourist town for Lake Titicaca. It was good to stretch the legs a bit after having sat in a bus for close to 10 hours! Even though it was 8pm there were still tour shops open selling tours to Isla del Sol etc, so we sorted out a tour for Wednesday and booked bus tickets to La Paz for Thursday. Then found some dinner and crashed for the night as we had to be up at 0630 to get sorted for our Isla del Sol tour.

Photos:
1) Mountains across Lake Titicaca
2) Michelle's "Artist's impression of the sunset without my glasses on"