Blogs from Puno, Peru, South America - page 76

Lake Titicaca stands at 3810 meters above sea level and is the highest navigable lake in the entire world. Being 165km in length, 72km wide and its deepest point at 284m, this monstrous lake is a wonder to behold. Acting as a giant thermal regulator, the solar energy attained during the cloudless days is released during the evening and makes living in this inhospitable plateau possible. Straddling the Altiplano, a flat expanse of land between the Royal Mountains in Bolivia and the Peruvian Andes, the lake covers an astonishing 8560km squared and contains 896,000,000 cubic litres of water. The now fresh water lake was formed when the techtonic plate which runs from Alaska to Antartica and is responsible for the Andes and the Rockies first clashed into the landmass and trapped this huge expanse of water ... read more

From Copacabana crossed the border into Peru and stayed a couple of nights in Puno. Puno is a bustling town, with not much to see from a tourist point of view until you catch a boat to the world famous Islas Flotantes (Floating islands) - home to the Uros people.... read more

We had no idea what kind of trip we were facing up, when we got on the boot that morning.( we had organised this trip the night before without shopping around, ai, can be really wrong, but luck was with us...) A little van picked us up at the hotel and brought us to the harbour of Puno. From where a tourist boot was waiting for us to drive us first to the floating islands of Ouros, and then to the island of Amantani. It was a trip of three hours with the sun high in the sky and a beautiful view over the lake and the mountains. pure relaxing... First we visited the floating island, and the next stop was on the island of Mantan´where We stayed one night with a very lovely family ( ... read more

with a tourist boat we went on lake titicaca. After visiting some little floating islands we asked a family if we could stay the nigth on a island. and so we waved the touristboat goodbye and stayed for a long cold nigth on a small island. The next day we relaxed a little bit on the island and played with the childeren some card games. Because the tourist boat didn't came to pick us up we had to rom back for two hours to the city puno...but it was worth staying in this beautiful atmosphere and highest lake in the world on 4000mt heigth.... read more

Thank you to all of you for writing to us via the travel blog , it is really good to know you are enjoying our travel stories. Please keep them coming! I will have to split this next story into two parts. First part, is the trip to the floating islands. Quite an amazing idea, these locals who where trying to escape from Spanish persecution decided to tie a bunch of these reeds together on the edge of Lake Titicaca to create floating islands then to build houses, boats and other useful things out of the stuff. Nowadays they make money by selling items made out of the same reeds to tourists. It was really cool, but you know that they just put on a show as soon as the tourist boat arrives. Part 2 So............ ... read more