Fodor’s Travel. August 2026.

On a cool November morning, deep-blue waters stretched in front of me, while pillowy white clouds drifted across the sky. As we hiked up on the vehicle-free Isla del Sol along Lake Titicaca’s shoreline, passing fields of potatoes and wild herbs, local women selling handwoven ponchos and posing fluffy alpacas, my Thaki Travel guide, Eldy Andrade Terceros, a petite woman in her fifties, filled the silence with stories about the local folklore while also helping distract me from the thinning air and the steady strain of hiking at nearly 13,000 feet.

“This pristine body of water is home to the Bolivian Navy,” she said with pride.

Straddling the border between Bolivia and Peru, Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable body of water in the world, sitting at an elevation of 12,507 feet (3,812 meters). It is massive, covering over 3,200 square miles (8,372 square km) and plunging to depths of 945 feet (288 meters).

But why does a completely landlocked nation maintain a naval force of roughly 5,000 personnel?

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