The Bus Trip to Copacabana

It took me three visits to the travel agency before I was actually able to buy a ticket to Copacabana, so I was hoping this trip would have been worth the hassle. At the end of the day, it was. At 7:15 am on Wednesday, the bus picked me up at my hotel where we were taken to another hotel to switch buses. There were only about 25 of us on the bus, which was very modern. I sat across from an older German man who swore (in English) every time he missed a good photo opportunity along the way.

About ½ way into the three-hour journey, we reached water – I thought it was Lake Titikaka already. Well the driver starts shouting very quickly, telling us to have our belongings ready, along with our passport and 2 bolivianos (about 25 cents) and to exit the bus. Several of us thought we were crossing the Peruvian/Bolivian border, but we weren’t. There was simply no bridge to cross, so the empty bus was loaded onto a cargo ship and we were put onto a passenger ferry to cross the lake.

After that rather unusual halfway point, the views became spectacular. As we started to curve through the mountains on a very narrow road, reminiscent of the road I took to reach the top of Macchu Picchu, you could see the white-capped tops of the Andes in the distance, as well as spectacular views of the lake. At least a dozen times during the journey, the driver had to honk his horn to clear the road as dozens of sheep were being herded across the highway. Some barely made it without getting hit by the bus.