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Puno

Arrived on the Titicaca Lakeside town of Puno, Peru. Stayed in hostal Verrey on Avenida Tacna a few blocks away from the central Plaza. Not a pretty town, but quite bustling with school children and markets. We walked towards the shore but got as far as a massive market where they sold everything from stocking, tooth paste and batteries, to fruit, nuts and fish. The main fish that are caught here from the 3800 meter high lake (the highest lake in the world) are trout and King Fish.

As soon as the sun went down, it turned freezing, below 0 degrees celcius, and we got to try out all our thermal gear for the first time which worked very well. We went out for dinner, Leon had an omlette that he did not react well to at about 2 in the morning and the next day we spent getting a visa for the much loved South African passport and arranging a island trip for the next day. It was quite a boring day because there is not much to do in Puno. But we ate Salteñas and Empanadas which are basically the same as Cornish Pasties stuffed with cheese, chicken and veg or meat and veg. We are slightly addicted to them at the moment and apparently Bolivians are experts at making them, so we are looking forward to trying them there.

On Tuesday we caught a tourist boat early and went to the Islas Uros, the floating Islands. These were originally created when people ran out of islands to settle on and decided to just lay reeds on top of their reed boats and start living on them. Now they are floating reed islands that are secured with Eucalyptus trunks so that the fishermen don´t loose their houses when they go fishing. They have to lay reeds down continuously to replace the rotting reeds below. When you walk on the islands they are soft and bouncy. The people that live on the islands live in families of 10 to 20 per island, if they don´t like their neighbours, they can either lift up their reed house and put it on a boat to move it to another island or they can split their island up. We walked around the islands and the women were trying to sell us handicrafts and the men were arranging reed boat trips to other islands. We caught a reed boat much to Leon´s delight as we missed the Gondola ride in Venice. After visiting another island, we were off on our very slow motorised boat to Taquille. Here we hiked up to the top of the island where the town is situated. We had a delicious King Fish lunch with rice ,soup (off course) and Mantanilla tea, tasted like mint. We walked back down the hill after lunch to our slow boat for a three and a half hour trip back to Puno. A beautiful sunset!

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