Lake Titicaca, one of the few things I'd known about Peru since I was a kid. A huge lake at 3800m above sea level, floating islands built continuously from dry reeds, which people still live on today, Indians in colourful shawls, blue sky...
Even though we'd been moaning in the evening about having to get up early, in the end we were all awake an hour before the alarm. At 3800 metres you just don't sleep all that well. Jam for breakfast again, luckily the lady then turned up offering a banana pancake, yum.
We set off pretty much at the last minute, there wasn't a taxi anywhere, so we grabbed two moto-rickshaws for 2 soles each. At the harbour the classic swarm of touts, in the end we managed to buy boat tickets (30 soles) and change some dollars too. We're heading to the floating islands of Uros, a phenomenon that came about here many centuries ago, when the people of the Uros tribe didn't want to be pushed around by the other tribes any longer and developed an ingenious technology of building floating islands out of the tall grass that grows in the lake.
So we got off onto one of the Uros islands and right after stepping out you could really feel the ground swaying and squelching underfoot. The Uros people make houses out of that grass too, they split us up into little groups and invited us home. We were invited by Ahmed. The hut was about 2x2 metres, he lives there with his wife and two kids, about two years and 8 months old. Building a hut takes about a month, but they wait a year for the grass to grow enough.
The boats they use to get between the islands are made of grass as well. Either smaller canoes, or fairly big catamarans. We took a ride on one.
The next island was Amantaní. That one is bigger and doesn't float. 4000 people live there, mostly farmers who grow corn, peas and so on. Interestingly, the corn here looks completely different. It's either white or black, it has a much bigger kernel, up to the size of a small cherry, and a considerably shorter cob. Tastes excellent.
Accommodation for gringos on Amantaní works on a rotation system. A few old ladies in colourful ponchos simply wait at the harbour and each one randomly picks some gringos and takes them home. LP wrote something about a dirt floor and cooking on a fire on the ground, but in reality we got a cracking little room upstairs and there was a cracking toilet downstairs. The lady does cook on a fire, but the food was excellent.
After lunch we set off for a walk into the little town. At this altitude moving about is pretty hard work, so we made lots of "photographic" stops :) . The most interesting one was at the volleyball court, where the teams of older junior girls Pachmama were playing against Pachtata :) . Over their traditional heavy colourful costumes the girls had nylon jerseys with numbers pulled on. All the girls were solidly overweight so the match was pretty static :) .
With great difficulty we clawed our way up the hill above the town to have a look at the Pachamama ruins. The ruins weren't up to much, but there were cracking views of the stone terraces, farmers with hoes (no ploughs) and the surrounding islands.
Dinner was cracking again, and since it's pitch dark from seven onwards, by ten we were all asleep. A debate also came up about whether to stay here another day. Because we've got a horribly hectic schedule and we're forever moving on somewhere. We put the decision off until tomorrow.
So we wanted to bum around for one day, and we pulled it off, though a bit differently.
It was pissing down in the morning. But then again we woke up by ourselves at six, so catching the boat at eight was no problem. There was a minor complication in that our landlady didn't want to be paid in dollars, so she had to come to the harbour with us, where the Canadians changed it for us. We then spent 7 hours on the boat with them, with one little 5-minute walk around the island of Tagnilla. The Canadian couple, around thirty, were also on a round-the-world trip for a year. She got a year of unpaid leave at work and he had to quit, but they were clearly enjoying it. All day we swapped experiences and stories from all over the world and it was good fun.
In the afternoon we got to Puno, dumped our backpacks at the bus station and headed to the Coca museum. It was two small rooms with a talk about the history and effects of coca leaves. You can get them everywhere here, we routinely have coca tea, coca sweets, and for the Inca Trail we'll stuff fresh leaves in our pockets, because it helps with altitude sickness and fatigue. Then we just walked across Plaza del Armas square, had dinner and spent the rest of the time before the bus to Cusco chatting in a cake shop over cake and coffee.
On the bus we bought VIP first class, which was 70 CZK more expensive, but in return we each have a huge leather armchair to ourselves like in a living room :) .
