...LAKE TITICACA

Yet another worlds highest... Lake Titicaca is known as the worlds highest 'navagable' lake. I assume they added the word 'navagable' because there's a puddle or marsh somewhere in Tibet that is higher... but this is a real lake & it is breathtaking! I've never seen water so blue, and my camera didn't do it any justice. First we walk along the shore of Lake Titicaca searching for anyone with a boat who will take us to the Island Of The Sun - believed by the Incas as the birthplace of the sun.

And we've found our boat... now where's the owner. The trip should cost about a dollar or two.

There were four of us - all exchange students - plus the two men who own the boat & are rowing in this picture.

We stop for a look around a small island with what we are told to be Incan ruins... So we climb...

Being that I'm no expert on ruins of any sort, I'll take their word for it... At the top of the Incan stone-staircase we find a lovely view of the lake.

Then a little complication as our boat dropped us off on another shore instead of at the Island Of The Sun. We were shown a direction to start hiking & were told that we'd find a boat to take us the rest of the way... "over there." Well, there really wasn't much we could do but start hiking because we'd been stranded somewhere in the middle of nowhere on the lakeshore of this mamouth lake. The hike was maybe about 2 miles...? I wonder if we were in Peru at this point. Who knows.

At the end of this trail, as told, we found a few houses - one of which had a rowboat. It was at this point where I learned the spanish word for "bail" because water was seeping through the bottom of the boat. They row - we bail. (that's my friend Dan on the right, next to another one of our exchange student friends from the US)

We've reached the Island of the Sun... By this time however, it was late enough to call it a day. There were four of us sharing a three man tent & we were close enough to the Peruvian border that the situation warrented keeping an eye out for anything suspicious - so we took two hour shifts staying awake. We were all between 16 and 18 years old... what were we really going to do if something happened? Who knows - but luckily enough, nothing did. In fact, it was a night of absolute peace at the top of the world. By the way, we realized we were at the top of the world when we tried boiling water to cook with. It took an eternity to bring about 15 ounces of water to a boil.

Ruins of an Incan house.

The next batch of photos are from the town of Copacabana which sits on the southeast shore of Lake Titicaca.