passing the Bolivian Armada on the way - as you can see it´s a force to be reckoned with - and arrived at about 10 for our tour and hike. A tour guide greeted us and we decided to join his group, although as with most of these guides it´s a bit hit and miss. We visited some pre-Inca ruins which were quite well preserved, we saw the temple of the sun that the local people now use as farm-land, and a Puma-shaped rock which the Inca's worshipped. After this we hiked 11 kms over the whole island, heading both uphill and down in the hot sun. The views were beautiful, the dusty brown island sloping down into the cool blue water of the lake. Lake Titicaca is vast, spanning thousands of square kilometres. 
The weather was glorious, it was chilly at first and we had to wear our woolly hats, but soon it became very hot and sunny with a cool mountain breeze. 
Perfect weather. At one point, as we were walking we heard a sound like horses running over the hill, we looked around but nothing was there. We carried on walking but heard the noise again. We then noticed a patch of plants moving rapidly and realised it was a small tornado moving over the land and picking up all the plants and anything else in the way (a pair of trousers drying by someone's house) and throwing them into the air. It was a bit eerie and we were the only ones around to see it.
A couple of hours later we arrived at our destination with around 1 hour 30 mins to kill before our boat departed and found a small restaurant with a fantastic view of the lake and islands.
There was an old hippy playing a guitar outside the restaurant and he invited us to sit down and sing some songs with him, we sort of declined in a reserved British way but he insisted. We went into the restaurant to look at the menu and order some food and drinks and were greeted by a small boy of about 6 years old who showed us the menu and took our order. Being served by a child was certainly a first for us. He dutifully bought our drinks out on a tray and set our place. Very sweet. Our hippy friend, Eduardo, pulled up a chair and two other English people sitting nearby were pulled into the group guitar and panpipe session. 
It was all pretty funny, especially when our new friend started impersonating Elvis complete with a thick Bolivian accent. Then he began to play the panpipes while the English guy sang Beetles tunes, it was pretty cool and definitely a 'traveling moment'. After a while we checked the time and to our alarm realised that we only had half an hour until our boat left and our food hadn't even arrived. We went to alert the chef that we needed the food straight away and our soup came out. We slurped it down quickly and went back to alert the chef that we needed our fried trout immediately. Ten minutes later it still hadn't come, I went into the kitchen to see what was happening only to be greeted by the 6 year old boy (he wasn't the chef incase you're wondering) to explain in broken Spanish “vamos in cinqo minutos para el barco!” We had 10 mins before the boat left and if we missed this boat we would be staying on the island for the rest of the night. Eventually it came but we had to shove it into plastic takeaway trays and run like the wind to catch our boat. As we were leaving our drunken hippy friend started to ask us about Princess Diana and asked us for our address in the UK, very bizarre, he also told us that he was a millionnaire with lots of money in the bank... we would have loved to stay and chat but unfortunately still had to run down a mountainside at 4,000 metres altitude to catch the boat. We thankfully made it with a couple of minutes to spare and ate our trout lunch ontop of the boat on the way back – we've both agreed it was one of the best lunches we've had in Bolivia so far, if not the most stressful. Unfortunately our dinners haven't been as successful, the food in Bolivia is nothing to rave about, but you live and learn... and learn to keep a packet of chocolate biscuits in your bag just in case!
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