Titicaaaaaca...

The bus to Puno, Peru featured in-bus Bingo and plenty more desert. Puno is on the south shore of the very large, very high, somewhat salty Lago Titicaca, which straddles the Peru-Bolivia border. According to a local, Bolivia got the titi and Peru got the caca. The lake was made famous in the early ´70s by Jacques Cousteau, who claimed to be on a biological mission of discovery, but was in fact looking for a giant life-sized statue of a man made of solid gold at the bottom of the lake.

Cousteau did not find the gold statue, but he did find primordial frogs with wings and gills. I remember vividly seeing that discovery on TV when I was a kid… Jacques holding one of these frogs by its back legs and pointing out all of its weird features. I vaguely remember his estimate of the number of frogs in the lake, too, using his special Cousteau science: 10⁵ frogs/m³.

Puno is a fairly dirty, busy little town. The streets are dominated by big heavy pedal tricycles used to carry people, wood, stoves, dogs on top of fruit, metal, and entire extended families. They are by far the most widely used form of transport in the city.

Our time was pretty limited in Puno, so we signed up for a tour to the floating reed islands of Uros, and to an island that has been inhabited for 10,000 called Taquile. The floating islands were very neat. They lay down layers of opposingly oriented reeds on top of floating moss over an area of about 500 square meters to create a floating platform, and then farm fish in holes in the middle, and build huts on them. The people were evicted from the shore a few thousand years ago, and are still living on the lake, although recently they have gained a foothold on shore again.

One gets the feeling that their style of living has been frozen in its current state because of the tremendous appeal it has to tourists. Once the tourists leave the island they probably slip back into jeans and take the motorboat to shore to check their email. Someone actually mentioned that they do have internet on the floating islands, powered by solar panel, but without a satellite feed I find that a bit hard to believe.

We saw a little boy trying to pee off the edge of the floating island, but ended up spraying a nice reed boat instead. We later climbed in and took the reed boat across the canal. But pee is clean, right?

The next day we climbed on a bus to Copacabana, in Bolivia. This border crossing was very easy. They actually allow contraband and coca leaves to be brought through this border crossing. I’m not sure why exactly, but maybe they figure there is exactly as much contraband in one country as in the other, so it doesn’t matter if there’s an even exchange.

This was the only city we saw in Bolivia. It was very cheap, the people were very poor, and for the most part, people on the street we found a little less friendly that in Peru/Chile/Argentina, but this is based on very limited exposure.
We loaded up on food in the local market, and took a boat to Isla del Sol, which is an island that has been lived on for a very long time, and is the mythical birthplace of important Incan deities. The island is covered in terraces, and its shoreline is generally very sheer, so once off the boat all the tourists climb about 400 steps to the southern town to check into their hostels.

We decided to keep walking to the beaches on the north-west shore to camp, and within about 15 minutes of stepping off the boat we were completely gringo-free, exploring the maze of paths that have been developed over the millennia by local farmers and their animals.

This was a truly incredible experience. We didn’t need a map, we could just pick paths that looked about right, although a couple of times we ended up walking through people’s living rooms. More on that later.

On the way to the beaches we found a soccer event in full swing! The island was so hilly it was hard to believe they had a space flat enough for a pitch, but on top of a big hill there was a large enough plateau. A nice old man told us that there were 7 teams of 11 people that played every Sunday on this field. It was very fun to watch the island people hanging out, eating, listening to music… like Parc Jeanne-Mance softball without the alcohol… and softball.

We continued on our way and found the perfect beach for camping. A little girl offered us her nice grassy backyard to camp in, so we accepted (for 5 Bolivianos - 80 cents), and set up shop. We tried to cook spaghetti at 4000m which didn’t work at all. We ended up with a disgusting glob of muck… which we ate. But it was gross. The girl’s family ran a kiosko (little store) right next to us that had red wine! So we got lucky.

The sun went down and farmers herded their animals home along the beach, a stunning sunset over the lake behind them. That was very pretty.

The stars that night were unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It was extremely bright. The dust clouds in the milky way were very well-defined, and the north-south axis was as plain as day because the upside-down big dipper could be used to find north, and the southern cross to find south.

The next morning I woke up horribly sick, but managed to stagger back; Jen basically dragged me to the boat on the south shore. In spite of that, Isla del Sol was a big highlight. Pigs, cows, sheep, ass, long-cultivated land, very nice people, and the feeling of genuine adventure, walking around on the ancient paths.

We made our way back to Puno, then grabbed a tour bus to Cusco that made stops at points of interest along the way. We saw some interesting pre-Incan artifacts, the Incan city of Raqchi with its giant silos, and a really interesting colonial church built on Incan foundations. Incans were very good with big rocks, so many many colonial structures are built on Incan foundations.

We arrived in Cusco at around 6PM, and met the daughter of the family whose property we had arranged to rent. She brought us home to our new pad, yada yada yada… It’s actually a great story, but this is a good time to stop. Stay tuned for stories of Machu Picchu, as well as the lesser known but equally affecting Mucho Poochu.