Tips 👏
- Small but cute city, worth to spend one or two days there to relax.
- Ideally located if you plan like us to carry on to Peru.
🏠 Accommodation
We stayed at Hotel Lago Azul and it perfect. Nice and big room with view on the lake, fresh daily breakfast.
🚲 Getting there
Bus from La Paz of 4 hours, with TouriBus, booked via Tickets Bolivia, including pick-up from the hotel. A bit more pricy than local bus but easier. On the way, we had to go out of the minibus and took a boat for 15 minutes to cross the lake, well guided by the driver.
⏱ Duration
We stayed three days and two nights, and felt that was enough.
❌ Miss
Initally we planned to get to Isla Del Sol for a day trip, but we were too tired and it was christmas time. We decided to just chill and go to Taquile Island once in Peru.
City day 🚶
Besides Isla Del Sol, there’s not much to do except relaxing on the shores of the lake. We spent our day chilling at the hotel, enjoying the bar and the view. We also decided to use our time to prepare our transition to Peru the following day (see below).
The city itself doesn’t offer much except plenty of agencies and average restaurants. To make the most of your time here, visit the surrounding viewpoints, and opt-in for a boat ride to the local islands.
Peru border crossing 🚧
Our next stop was Puno in Peru. There’s several bus company who can take you there, and we’ve opted for Trans Titicaca, which we are not recommending at all.
We bought our tickets the day before online via Tickets Bolivia for the 25th of December at 9AM. We arrived at the office and first they told us we had to print our e-tickets, which we couldn’t since everything was closed at this time. That didn’t matter much since the bus never left. Apparently, it was not full enough so the next one would be in the evening. After some heated debates, we decided with another bunch of tourists to make our way by ourselves to Puno.
We hired a cab for 6Bs per person to the Kasani Border checkpoint. We got our passports stamped at the Bolivian border, and walked toward the Peruvian side, with a nice view on the lake. We then got our passports stamped at the Peru border, and then got a cab for 10S up to the nearby bus terminal in the town of Yunguyo in 5 minutes. A bunch of collectivos (minivan) were waiting there, doing the trip to Puno for 10S per person. We’ve teamed up with the other tourists and hired a full one for 150S direct to Puno, in two hours. Arriving there, we got a cab and headed to our hotel.
Long story short, don’t take a bus company to do Copacabana to Puno. Doing it by yourself will be faster and cheaper, and very straight forward. It seems all the bus companies keep having bad reviews. It’s also a very nice experience! Just be sure to cross the border during the day since it’s closed at night.
Restaurants 🍲
There’s tons of restaurants for tourists, but all of them got review of food poisoning. We found two of them which were fine:
- Gourmet Ali: plenty of options, for vegetarians too, with local and western food with a decent price.
- Sapori d’Italia: Closed for Christmas, but looked like a very nice Italian option.
Read Next ⏭️
That’s the end of our trip to Bolivia. You can go back to the main Bolivia post, check again La Paz, or check-out other trips from the main page.