Lake Titicaca

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Puno is a hole. Apart from the central plaza and a touristy (and expensive street) the rest of the place is run down. Thankfully, I didn't come to Puno for Puno (why would anyone?), I came to Puno for Lake Titicaca.

According to Wikipedia, Lake Titicaca is 3,812 m (12,500 ft) above sea level making it one of the highest commercially navigable lakes in the world (whatever that means) and is also the largest lake in South America. I booked my tour, 2 day/1 night of Uros, Amantani and Taquile, from my hostel (Inka's Rest, pretty good) for 60 soles, which is about right (don't book before hand, it can be much more expensive). The tour went something like the following.

Day 1

Took early morning boat from Puno to the floating islands of Uros, which were really interesting. These are artificial islands made of reeds, "anchored" down so they don't float off. For some reason their ancestors thought it'd would be better to make these floating islands (which apparently lasts for 10-15 years) and live on them rather than on solid ground. They are self-sufficient and get through food from mostly fishing and hunting birds. However, it appears tourism has changed their lifestyle a bit and the place has become tourist orientated. We were encouraged to buy the local handicrafts and children (the girls and the women were wearing some amazingly bright colour clothes) were placed for the cameras. I'm not too sure what I felt about that, I guess I'm a bit sad and annoyed about it, but there again my presence contributed to this change (I did also get sucked-in and bought a hand-knitted towel).

Next stop was Amantini, a proper island this time, where we would stay the night with local families. We organised ourselves into groups (I was with Sam and Olivier who I'd met at Inka's Rest) and each group were called out in turn to go off with the host family, it was a bit like picking teams in the playground. We were second pick and were allocated to Angel and Eduocir, who turned out to be very nice people and equally importantly they had a nice house. Our room was small but comfortable and cosy.

After lunch (which was alright and involved this hard omelet thing, which I later found out to be cheese) we walked up to the top of the island. Wow, it was hard work! Obviously, hiking the Colca Canyon wasn't enough (we're about 600m higher than the top of the canyon). The views at the top were amazing (a word I've probably used too much on this blog, but it was different to anything I'd seen before).

After dinner (less mysterious than lunch) we were invited to a "party" organised for us. Our hosts provided us with traditional clothes, so we looked like idiots, and danced like idiots (I'm sure the locals loved it), but it fun!

Day 2

Not an extremely eventful day. We left our hosts in the morning for the island of Taquile. We enjoyed our stay and really got the feeling that they were genuinely friendly people, like most Peruvians I've meet.

The bad weather caught up with us as we landed at Taquile (where our tour guide fell into the lake as we were docking, hilarious!), so the trek up to the main village was not great. There wasn't much at the village either, apart from a souvenir shop that smelt of strong, bad body odour. Lunch turned out not to be free, and the designated restaurant was actually pretty expensive, so the three of us along with another three Americans (Jon, Lauren and Becky) found our own lunch and then our own way back to the boat, by which time the weather had cleared up. The tour group took their time for lunch so we had quite a bit to spare, which we burnt by posing in front of an old stone archway en route to the dock. We must have spent about 40 minutes there, but we did perfect some hilarious poses. Fun times.

We got back to the hole around 3pm and met up with the Americans, who were great fun on our trip, for dinner to relive the good times.

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Photos

Girls on Uros
How cute!

Gringos
Sam, Olivier and I before the party.