Puno, Lake Titicaca

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This site crashed for a few days at the start of the month and as well as losing some of our entries, we weren´t able to log in for a while, so we are really behind with this now. I am going to rattle through a few entries now as quickly as I can before we forget absolutely everything we´ve done. Photos will be added when we get a better computer and have more time so check back!

Anyway, a little town called Puno on the Peruvian end of Lake Titicaca was our next destination. Unfortunately Neil got really quite sick on our last night in Cusco and we weren´t sure we´d even be able to go at all. We had booked a nice coach tour to take us, which included stops at a few interesting Incan sites and lunch en route, but he´d have never managed that, so I pumped him full of super-strength painkillers bought in the US and managed to get him on a direct public bus, just 6 hours travelling instead of 10.

It was straight to bed once we arrived at the hotel in Puno, another strange affair where we´re sure we were the only guests. But it had cable tv, which was a lifesaver being stuck in the room for a couple of days. Puno wasn´t up to much anyway, to be honest, so he didn´t miss too much! The reason people go to Puno at all is as a base to visit the Lake islands, and we did manage to get out to the closest of them on our last day, the famous Uros floating reed islands. These are a group of islands housing 8-10 indiginous families each made entirely out of reeds floating on the water. It was really quite bizarre to see and walk about on, but the novelty wore off for us quite quickly as they rely completely on tourism these days and it´s now nothing more than a tourist attraction really. It also didn´t help that our ramshackle boat broke down about half a dozen times both on the way there and the way back, which got a bit tiresome. Although I suppose these people all do still live out there and that´s interesting in itself. And worth it for the crazy feeling that there´s nothing between you and the bottom of the lake than a few layers of floating reeds!

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