Titicaca and altitude trouble

What was supposed to be a highlight of the borderlands of Bolivia and Peru, Lake Titicaca turned out differently for us.

It's the highest located lake in the world! 3800 meters above sea level and on the Bolivian side has Copacabana as main city and Puno on the Peruvian side. It's very beautiful and has many small islands to visit.
We took a bus from La Paz for only 3-4 hours, but during this time, both Anne and started to feel nauseous. Arriving we were not feeling well and dragged ourselves to our hostel through snowy streets and got into our private room, where we started throwing up really bad.

I don't want to go into details here, but I never tried anything like this! When throwing up comes from the head - not the stomach - and your brain is low on oxygen so you can't think straight, it was absolutely terrible experience having trouble with altitude.
While trying different things to help us out of the misery, we asked the hostel owners for help. When the woman owner saw us and heard our story, she said we have got altitude sickness. She called a taxi right away and took us to the local hospital to get oxygen. Here I even got an injection, as I also had bad stomach pain and a cold.

Returning to our hostel after a couple of hours of oxygen, we felt a bit better but exhausted. We stayed more than 24 hours in our room and the two sweet Danish girls we met in La Paz came with food to us and took care of us. We felt very lucky to have them around!

Feeling a bit better but tired, we went on a day trip to Isla del Sol. A very beautiful island in Lake Titicaca, where the climate allows more exotic fruit and vegetables than normal in this altitude. Walking the island it felt almost tropical in some parts, and colder more gol in others. It was a hard day for us, being constantly tired, out of breath and me still nauseous, but good we went. I would wish we could have enjoyed the area and spend more time here, so maybe it's something for me to come back to.

With that done we decided to get away from the altitude as fast as possible. So we crossed the border to Peru and could now count 5 countries visited in South America in 6 weeks! And we went to Puno on the other side of the lake.
Here we did a little boat trip to their special islands made of straws! Floating islands which has been anchored but only 1,5 meter thick. The community living there used to live of fishing, but the lake couldn't keep up with the amount being fished, so now they more or less live of tourism.
That was a sad, sad sight because as soon as I sat foot on the island it was like a show. The ladies saying and doing things like robots. They dressed up us tourists in their local clothes, tried forcing us to buy souvenirs, sang songs like "Row, row, row your boat" to entertain us and more. I had a terrible taste in my mouth of being a part of it.

In the evening we left Puno with the night bus to Cusco, looking forward to being in "only" 3300 meters and hopefully let go of the nauseous and being constantly out of breath.