It's been a while since we've been in one place long enough and with good enough Internet to update our blog properly. Therefore, whilst we're now in Chile I'm going to pick up where Steph left off and briefly describe to you our time at Lake Titicaca and our onward journey to Cusco. We took the bus from La Paz to Copacabana, a small town on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca. We bumped along the dusty roads out of La Paz over the desolate and vast Altiplano region. After 4 hours or so of being shaken around, the blue waters of Lake Titicaca came slowly into view. The lake is famed for being the highest navigable lake in the world (it's around 3,800 meters above sea level). It also has an average depth of just over 100m (thank you Wikipedia). The lake is almost composed of two separate basins (Lago Grande and Pequeño) connected at a narrow strait; the Strait of Tequina. It was here, at San Pablo de Tiquina, that we were bundled out of our bus and into a rickety wooden motor boat to cross the strait. We looked on in bemusement as our bus was separately loaded onto an open ferry every bit as wooden and rickety as our boat before also wobbling across the strait. We arrived on the opposite bank at San Pedro de Tiquina, re-boarded and after a few more hours arrived in Copacabana. We strolled down the colourful main street towards the lake. Small wind-made waves lapped the shore and we couldn't see land on the other side. It felt like being by the sea. We checked into a dodgy hostel with a lake view. We decided against trying to visit Isla del Sol (island on the lake that the Inca's believed was where the Sun was born) as we had to leave the next day and we'd heard that the long boat ride wasn't worthwhile just for the afternoon. Instead, we decided to walk up a large hill on the edge of town to watch the sunset. The hill, Cerro Calvario, is a modern site of pilgrimage in Bolivia, and our walk up was punctuated by stone crosses and trees adorned with simple paper offerings. We watched a beautiful sunset over the lake from the top before slowly picking our way back down at dusk. The next morning, we found the hostel breakfast to consist of three broken and dried up pieces of bread and some brown banana. Opting to pass on breakfast, we decided to go for an early canoe trip on the lake. Finding the shore line smelling and looking a little bit like a toilet we hesitated, before eventually putting on a show of steely determination and climbing in and paddling clear. Once out on the lake we found it beautifully clear and very peaceful. The only sounds coming from the intermittent water-running of the endangered flightless Titicaca Grebe and our customary arguing about when, how and in what direction to paddle. Lovely. We checked out of the hostel and found a cool cafe for a lovely breakfast. We whiled away the morning there watching the owners play Uno and the tourists wandering down the main street. Our bus out of Copa was due to leave at 1 for Cusco. However, the main road was closed as there was a large market at the border and the bus couldn't get through. After some general confusion, the bus company officials herded us on to a minibus with the other gringos trying to leave Copa and we took a small dirt road to the border. The border post was a swirl of pumping Latino music, pickpockets and locals selling and buying all kinds of stuff including wardrobes with fitted clocks, pots and pans, wheelbarrows, building materials etc. The bus officials guided us to the border post to get our passports stamped. This seemed to run smoothly, particularly after our guides gave the border official some US dollars. We walked over the border into Peru, got our entry stamps and boarded a bus. So far, so good we thought. Alright we were well behind schedule and were worried about making it to Cusco that night, but at least we had a nice air conditioned bus booked for the rest of the journey. Er, no. The bus official suddenly told us that we would be stopping for 5 hours in Puno in Peru (7 hours from Cusco) and that the bus wouldn't leave again for Cusco until 9 that night! Furthermore, we needed to pay another USD 50 for the privilege of taking this bus. This turned out to be a scam. Instead we took the local bus which left immediately from Puno to Cusco. We should have waited in Puno longer to see if the more expensive bus we'd paid for was going to turn up but I was anxious to get to Cusco asap so stupidly jumped on the first local bus. After 8 hours on the very cramped bus and watching a deafeningly loud and inappropriate horror movie twice, we arrived exhausted in Cusco... ~Chris