On the bus from Puno to Copacabana one of the guides started pretty much shouting at people in Spanish and obviously we didn´t undertand a word of it. What´s nice is that there is always someone who will help you and there was a guy from Barcelona who translated for us. Basically he was saying if you doin´t fill your immigration form in correctly then the Bolivian officials will leave you out on the street and won´t let you into Bolivia and the coach will carry on and leave you. Clearly this was really encouraging! There was a general air of apprehension on the bus as there can be corruption at the borders and they can make it difficult for you to get in if they want to.

Anyway we got to the Peruvian border and we all piled out of the bus and queued for at least 45 minutes to get stamped out of the country. From there you walk across the border into Bolivia and queue for at least another 45 minutes to get stamped into Bolivia. In all honesty it´s a joke, you could walk across the border without even visiting either office and no one would know, there is no control whatsover. After painstakingly filling in both our forms (in Spanish) they didn´t even bloody look at them, they just scanned our passports and then we were off. You could feel the relief on the bus as we pulled away and about 15 minutes later we were in Copacabana.

Copacabana was really nice, it´s situated on Lake Titiccaca and has a seaside resort feel about it, finally we could sit outside and have a beer. We went for something to eat as soon as we had checked in, I went for the local trout as they catch it in the Lake and Casson went for ...... a burger! To be fair though, burgers were being advertised as specialities and it was really good.

The next day we went down to the port and booked on the public ferry to take us to the North side of Isla Del Sol, the plan was to walk the 3 hours back to the South side and catch a ferry back to Copacabana. When we got there we had no idea a) which way to go and b) what people were saying to us but in the end we managed to work out the route. The Island was absolutely beautiful but guess what? It turned into the biggest hike ever, right up and over the island to over 4000 metre so breathing was difficult again. At one point we were walking uphill chatting to a Canadian girl when I stumbled and fell into Casson, what I didn´t tel him was that I´d had a really dizzy spell and had almost passed out. I didn´t want to be the one who had to stop walking so I powered through (only to be told off later for being so stupid)

It was a lovely day but both of us were so glad when we got to Yumani (the South side) as we were both absolutely knackered. We just had to navigate down some really steep steps to the lake to catch the boat and avoid death by donkey. On the same steps there were donkeys coming up and down and they were jostling each other, I was convinced one of them was going to knock his mate over and he would land on us! Casson didn´t share this fear for some reason!

Points

1) Casson´s habit for leaving things meant he left his cap on the boat, now I´ve mentioned before how much I hate the cap but I couldn´t bring myself to leave it as I´d spotted it on the seat so it´s still with us

2) We were ripped off by a whole 50p each on the ferry back, we knew it should be 20 bolivianos each and they charged us 25, we were so tired though that it realy wasn´t worth the effort standing our ground lol