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Published: March 3rd 2014
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27 February 2014 Thursday - Puno, Peru
We did not expect much of Puno as the guidebooks and internet sites didn’t have much good to say about it, probably because it doesn’t have a clutch of magnificent Spanish colonial Catholic Churches or a bunch of museums or fabulous squares. We were, however, pleasantly surprised on our initial walkabout. One of the criteria we use to make an initial assessment of a town or city is if there are more interesting-looking restaurants than we will have the time to visit during our stay there. Accordingly, Puno looks very promising and under-rated by the travel guides.
We had finally arrived at around 2am. We had met a young Belgian couple, Heyvaert and Bernard, who were also on a long-term Latin American journey, while waiting to board the bus in Cusco. Their travel plans had also been disrupted by the strike. We chatted while waiting and assisted each other in the scrum once the bus was ready for boarding and for the bags to be secured in the luggage compartment. The bus was packed, mostly with Peruvians who travel with boxes of goods, including things like television sets and the bulky old
style computer monitors. We shared a taxi to the hotel and crashed. We were unable to make breakfast the following morning despite a wake-up call with fifteen minutes to spare. About mid-morning we stirred ourselves and ventured out into the city.
Trip Advisor Review: Sillustani Inn. We arrived at this hotel at 2am after a strike-delayed later bus from Cusco and were greeted without hassle by a sleepy porter who checked us in and also had an extra room for a young Belgian couple we met on the bus and who hadn't previously made a reservation. Very quiet location. Our room had two large beds and steady hot water. Good wifi connection. Lovely and clean, old style family-type hotel. Book exchange. Buffet breakfast. Recommended.
Puno is a small port city at an altitude of 3822 meters (12,565 feet) above sea level. It sits on the banks of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world (Lake Titicaca is a place I have always wanted to visit since I was a kid and heard about it in a school geography class, most probably because of the name!) Most of the inhabitants are from the Andes mountains and the
city claims a unique mixture of modernity and tradition with many women dressed in the traditional, very colourful Andean clothing living and working next to their modern counterparts. We saw many examples of this during our walks around the town.
We started our day with coffee at La Casa del Correigidor. This was a wonderful little place with strong coffee and steady wifi. It is an old Spanish Colonial courtyard house that was originally built by a priest in the early 1700s. There was a man drinking coffee and reading Jung at the table next to ours – it was that kind of place!
Trip Advisor Review: La Casa del Correigidor We had read that this cafe served excellent coffee and was a comfortable place to relax and catch up on correspondence or reading, and we were not disappointed in that regard. We had missed breakfast in our hotel and hoped to get a bite here. They don't serve breakfast but we both had a fried egg, ham, cheese and tomato sandwich that was very breakfast-like! There are two rooms as well as some tables in an inner courtyard. The coffee was strong, as we like it. And
the wifi signal was also strong. We spent nearly two hours catching up on our emails and planning our next few days travel. Highly Recommended. When we left there was a man reading Jung at a table nearby - it is that kind of place!
We walked to the Puno Rail office to try to sort out our refund for cancelled bus portion of our trip to Machu Picchu but it was closed. We walked down to the pier to investigate our options for a boat trip or tour of Lake Titicaca for the following day. Then we walked back into the city centre for lunch. During all this walking around we stopped to browse in various shops, and also just stopped on street corners to watch the local people going about their daily lives.
Trip Advisor Review: La Casona restaurant. This restaurant was highly rated and we checked out the menu on our walkabout Puno town (along with about twenty other restaurants - Puno is FULL of interesting-looking restaurants!) and we returned for an excellent late lunch. Our starters were a sophisticated light-broth soup and a very creative piled-high avocado with potato salad and cucumber. Our main
courses were a very fresh Lake Titicaca trout, the white meat delicate and flaky, and grilled alpaca. The alpaca meat had a taste and texture very like veal. This was one of the nicest meals we have yet had in two months' of our travels in South America.
Still exhausted, we retired early with plans to catch a 7:45 am boat out onto Lake Titicaca the next morning.
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