Isla del Sol

My friend Gonzalo woke up at six in the morning to hug each other goodbye and left to work. It must have been the wednesday after the Holly week (Semana Santa) , I have lost the sense of days. Everyday is a good day. I took a look at the mountains of this city built between mountains and straight to the bus terminal to LAke Titikaka. We waited then, as is usual here, until the van was full of passengers. People may complain but it is a norm. Maybe that´s one of the reason why people look like they have all the time of the world. Others say is the altitude that makes people walk slow since they need to take small steps in order not to get tired to quickly. In any rate, as we rode for about two hours, this huge lake appeared. I didn´t expect it to be this attractive. There are points on which you don´t see the other side. I heard that once but it is different when you see it, when you are there. Times like this makes me wanting to have a compass so I can have an idea where I am, at least a sense of orientation. We got to Tiquina, a very small town where we had to got off the van and take a boat to cross a part tof the lake. There is another boat, the ferry, the takes the van by itself. We continued then to Copacabana the town from where I would go to Isla del Sol (Sun Island). As soon as I got to Copacabana I look for something to eat, but seeing around, and finding it very touristy again I decided to get some cancha (fried corn) and continued to get a boat, a local boat, to go to Isla del Sol. This was a boat made out of wood, local people were going to the island and apparently someone was moving out there. The boat was about to take off so knowing that I wouldn´t know how long it would take to fill out the next one, I decided to jump in with my sixty pounds of backpacks and go to the roof where another traveller, from Japan, was. This colourful boat took about ten minutes to leave so we were on the way to this island which the only thing I knew about was that it was in the middle (at least on the Bolivian side) of this magnificent lake. The ride took another one hour and a half. I want sometimes get there ´on time´but what is that anyways when you are travelling and have nowhere to go or everywhere to go? As the days have been passing by I wonder of the size and time I need to go to more places. It will take a lifetime. Feeling the breeze on the lake, watching the clouds that look like cotton balls, talking to Yaku, the Japenese friend and trying to guess what goes on the minds of the tens of people on this boat we got to the south zone of the island. Here, I saw a bunch of tourists seating by the beach, eating or drinking, waiting for the next boat perhaps. Somebody from the boat, what it looked to be another foreign to these lands, run to his hostel and run back to the boat. Yaku and I asked the people around us if the north side of the island had hostels as well. We decided then to continue after getting an afirmative answer. So another hour on the boat, this time a little colder and breezier. We met Fidel on the boat, he told us he had a hostel and a restaurant. We verbally booked our room with two beds and once on the north side we walked a couple of meters to drop our things. The people moving to the island stayed on the central side of the island and we, as everyone else, helped the family and friends to unload the boat.
We ate a trout with rice and salad and went on to walk to the next town on the island, Challa. We were trying to get a place where they had a TV since we wanted to watch a football match between a Bolivian and Argentinian teams. The Copa Libertadores, which is the SouthAmerican version of the Champions League in Europe. We walked to Challa until sunset and when we got there nobody had a TV. At least, no reception, so we decided to walk back after getting some batteries for our flashlights. On the way to Challa I had paid attention to the road since there were similar roads and we didn´t want to get lost under the stars. Kirei (beatiful) said Yaku, as we looked up every twenty steps to see the stars above us. The sky looked like a infinite black sheet of paper with millions of white dots. The same way as I used to wet my toothbrush with watercolors and spray it on a coloured paper.