Isla del Sol, Bolivia

Friday morning we woke up and jumped on the super slow 1.5 hour ferry from Copacabana to Isla Del Sol. First impressions on approaching the island were something along the lines of “Am I in a postcard?” Seriously though, steep, green, terraced cliffs with stone paths winding around crops and flowers, all surrounded by the blue waters of Lake Titicaca. What’s not to like?

After disembarking and a confusing 15 minutes of spanglish with some locals about where we had to go and who would show us, we eventually found Diego the owner of our hostel and one of his 4 legged friends. 

Now I have to say here that for the last 3 months we have both carried every ounce of our increasingly heavy backpacks at all times without asking for or needing help. However after hearing that the walk to Hostel Del Sol from the dock was around 40 minutes of steep uphill slog, added to the fact we had only spent 4 continuous days at altitude and Lake Titicaca is about 3800m above sea level, we though it would be smart to accept some help when it was offered.

Help in this case was in the form of one of Diego’s llamas – pictured below. After Diego got our our 2 bags strapped to the back of the little fella, we started off on the climb to the hostel. And about 5 minutes into the climb our new llama acquaintance decided that maybe we had bought a few too many heavy souvenirs and called it quits. He seriously couldn’t be budged despite Diego’s best efforts. Ah well, worth trying. We unloaded our junk from the now happy llama and ended up finishing the remainder of the trek carrying our own junk. In the end it wasn’t nearly as bad as we feared, and you could quickly forget how much your lungs were burning from the climb by turning around and taking in the view.

After we reached the hostel and checked in, we took about 10 minutes to recover before making the most of the weather and setting off on a south to north island trek. We were staying on the south of the island, and the roughly 10km walk to the north of the island took about 2.5 hours and had some of the most amazing scenery we have seen in not just Bolivia, but the whole continent thus far. Everything was super green due to the nightly rains in the current Bolivian wet season, and plenty of shepherds were out all over the island leading their flocks around the fresh grass. It was beautiful.

We eventually reached the little town in the north extremely hungry and pretty tired, but managed to find some delicious sandwiches down by the water that we refuelled on before setting off on the return journey. We returned to the hostel with about 25km in total under our belts for the day, and had a tasty pizza dinner before crashing satisfied into bed.

The next day we were still pretty sore from the day before, and just cruised around the town of Yumani (in the south of the island). Oh and Sammy and I went for an extremely short swim in the lake in the afternoon. We got a bottle of wine and some pringles and climbed up the hill above our hostel to watch the sunset. 

Next stop… Peru!