Buenos Aires to Vegas - The Trek

Breathing a sigh of relief on the bus, I bade farewell to La Paz. I was now en-route to Lake Titicaca. Copacabana is the main Bolivian town from which to do excursions onto Lake Titicaca and to the nearby Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun). The town itself offers little other than boating trips to the island and a large amount of restaurants serving trout (trucha) and another fish called pejerrey. Wikipedia: "Lake Titicaca is a lake located on the border of Bolivia was born here. and Peru. It sits 3,812 m (12,500 ft) above sea level making it one of the highest commercially navigable lakes in the world. On the Isla del Sol, there are over 180 Incan ruins. In the religion of the Incas, it was believed that the sun god, Inti, was born here" Our bus getting ferried across on the dodgiest pontoon I have ever seen Copacabana Some tourists thought it necessary to hire a military boat (complete with front mounted machine gun) to ferry them to the island I shared the bus with another ...

The Cama bus was a great idea which resulted in us arriving in La Paz early in the morning feeling quite refreshed and excited. Viewing the city is quite unique as it is located in a depressed bowl below the altiplano (upper plateau). This means that you get a view of city below you as you descend into the downtown area. Thankfully we had acclimatised to the altitude and so did not feel uncomfortable in the highest capital city in the world. We were booked into the Wild Rovers hostel. An Irish place with a notorious reputation for crazy parties. Wikipedia : "La Paz (meaning "The Peace" in Spanish) is the administrative capital of Bolivia. As of the 2001 census, the city of La Paz had a population of 789,585 , and together with the neighboring cities of El Alto and Viacha , make the biggest urban area of Bolivia, with a population of over 1.6 million inhabitants. Located at an altitude of 3,660 metres (12,008 ft), it is the world's highest capital city." Th...

Bus services in Bolivia are VERY different from Argentina and Chile. Our bus from Uyuni was an ancient hunk of junk that spewed all sorts of noxious gases into the air. That combined with horrendous, pot-holed dirt roads the entire way provided a very jolting 9 hour ride. We did a brief stopover in the town of Potosi , once the richest city in the world (1500s and 1600s) due to it´s rich silver deposits in Cerro Rico. This town is a tourist destination for people who want to visit the mines where people still work in medieval conditions. It was advised that anybody with asthma or suffering from claustrophobia should not make the visit. As some of our group were apprehensive about this, we decided to give it a skip and carry on to Sucre. And here is the usual wikipedia spiel: "Sucre (population 247,300 in 2006) is the constitutional capital of Bolivia , seat of the Supreme Court ( Corte Suprema de Justicia ). Located in the south-central part of the country, Sucre lies at an...