Lake Titicaca II-- Island tour

We got up early for our tour of the islands (and after having slept for like 12hrs!) and we were pretty excited about the boat ride on the lake, and the islands, staying with a family, etc...

I think on this one the pictures speak for themselves, so I'll shut up and post pictures... :)



The boat ride was pretty nice, and we meet a quite french family with 2 kids, and became good friends... :)



Uros is the first island, which is actually an artificial floating island, built with roots and reeds that they cut and cover the blocks of roots to make a "floor." Out of the same reeds, they build their houses, boats, and they even eat them! The entire island must be around 300sq. meters, and these people live here, year round...


After Uros, we went to Amantani, one of the biggest islands on the lake, and where we would be hosted by a local family and spend the night.


That's our home in Amantani, with our host Carmen...



That afternoon we hiked to the top of the mountain, to the Pacha Mama temple (or ruins actually) and watched the sunset... beautiful!


And that's our dinner... it wasn't the culinary experience of my life, but it was Ok... A soup made with quinoa and other vegetables, which included Oca, a potato-looking thing that will be mentioned later... :)


That evening after dinner, they had prepared a party for us, with folkloric dances, and they actually dressed us up with their colorful traditional outfits... we danced like crazy, and went home exhausted, only to get up early the next morning and head to Taquile.


Taquile was pretty, but kind of a disappointment actually. It was a tourist trap, with everything geared towards the tourists, and the prices reflecting that (5 soles, or almost 2 dollars for a bar of chocolate, which should cost 1 sol at the most!!) But since it was our last stop, after lunch we headed back to Puno, and couldn't wait to make our way to Colors, for desert and coffee again... :)

Next stop: Cuzco and Macchu Picchu!!

Puno, Peru

Puno is an interesting town; 90% of it is not touristic at all, and the result is you only see Peruvians going to and fro with their normal activities.

And then there's the 10%, which mainly consist of Parque Pinos and the adjoining pedestrian street, Calle Lima (or Jiron Lima, since that's the word they use for street instead of Calle, and had us quite confused at first), which is saturated with tourists...

We arrived around 11am, found a reasonably priced hotel (which wasn't easy!) and went out for internet, food, and to try and book our tour of the lake's islands, hopefully for the next day.

In the afternoon, after having lunch at this local restaurant (Sayani) and eating Alpaca and drinking purple corn juice (Chicha Morada), we also found a magical, wonderful Oasis in the middle of Puno... scratch that! In the middle of Peru! We found this cafe/restaurant/lounge bar place called Colors, with incredible desserts and coffee and food! What's more: the chef was Greek! No joke!



And here's the dessert:



The plan was to come back to Colors for dinner, but we ended up crashing, and they were coming to pick us up early the next morning for our 2-day tour of the islands, so that was that...

Lake Titicaca

Continuing from last entry...

So we arrived in La Paz at 7am. It seemed like a pretty incredible city, built like a spiral bowl, with the bottom around 600m lower than the top, and the mountains all around it, really making it look like a bowl.

However, we only stayed for a couple of hours, in the bus terminal, waiting for the next bus that would take us to Copacabana (nope, not the beach in Rio), a city on the shores of lake Titicaca.

Apparently I must've been really tired (after the journey from hell!) because I fell asleep almost immediately, and when I woke up, we were already in the highlands surrounding the lake.

It's quite a sight to wake up and see the beautiful blue skies and the beautiful dark blue waters and mountains and rolling hills all around...


(view from the window of the bus when I woke up... and the broken window with the cumpliments of Mene, who broke it trying to open... oops! )

Funny thing is though, there's a part of the lake where there's no road around, so our bus actually got on a boat, and we had to get on a different boat and chase after it! :) It was kinda funny because nobody explained anything to us, they just told us to get off the bus, and we watched and marvelled as the bus started to cross the lake without us...




Once on the other side, our journey continued for another hour or so, until we arrived in the beautiful Copacabana. We were tired, hungry and very dirty, so all we wanted was a room, a shower, and some good food...

We found a place called Residencial Sucre, with a nice room and hot shower for a reasonable price, and took it immediately. After the necessary showers, we went to find money exchange, food and laundry (which was also incredibly necessary!).



That's my happy face after a nice, HUGE and delicious Rainbow Trout, fished directly from the lake, and so fresh, it must've been fished a couple of hours before I ate it... :)

After food, a nap... that ended up lasting until the next morning, when unfortunately we had the bus to go to Puno, already in Peru. I say unfortunately because Copacabana is really beautiful, and I would've liked to stay a little longer, but Peru awaits!! :)

The Journey to La Paz

I realize I haven't updated this in a little while, and I should try to keep up to date more, and have to upload a million pictures, but I only have a little bit of time and I think the journey from Uyuni to La Paz deserves an entry all of itself... (even though there are other memorable bus rides that will be mentioned later...)

So like I mentioned in the end of the last entry, we arrived at Uyuni and had to wait until 8pm for the bus. Like idiots, we didn't wait until all the agencies were opened (it was like 12:30 when we arrived, and the majority would reopen at 2pm), we just bought our tickets in the first one we found, for 80 bolivianos, which seemed like a reasonable price, even though it meant we'd have to change buses in Oruro, at the ungodly hour of 3am... but alright, we really just wanted to get the hell out of there.

Time comes for the bus, and our Canadian friends from the Salar tour were actually coming part of the journey with us, only until Oruro, where they would take another bus to Cochabamba. They only paid 40 bolivianos (which is important info, will tell you why in a sec.)

The journey begins, and we immediately feel like we've been trapped inside an earthquake simulator, or something of the sort. No joke. The road was the worse thing I've seen so far, and the entire bus (which wasn't that new) was rattling and shaking like a blender... To make matters worse, there wasn't just the number of people that could fill the seats... there was much more! You know those buses you see in movies, with the chickens and the children and everything else mixed in?? Well, there were no chickens (or at least that I saw... but I made sure to close my eyes very quickly and ignore everything...) but it was kinda like that... people sitting on the floor, trying to sleep on the floor, filling the isles and every possible space...

Luckly, both Mene and I can sleep through anything, so that's what we did... turn towards the window, away from the crowd, and sleep....

Eventually, we made a stop, somewhere around midnight I think, and woke up, looked behind at our Canadian friends to see how they were doing, and the poor girl, Angie, she had been throwing up out the window nonstop for the last 4hrs or so... and Matt, her husband, could barely keep it down. They couldn't believe we had slept through the whole thing...

After that, we had a paved road, so it was better... until we stopped at 3am in Oruro.

In Oruro, we expect to change buses directly and leave to La Paz, but that's where we discover that we don't actually have tickets to La Paz, that the bus company we came with doesn't go all the way there, and the bus driver was walking around with us behind him, trying to find us tickets. Detail: there were people yelling around the platforms "La Paz, 15 bolivianos to La Paz..."

That's where we realized we'd just been screwed and the bus driver used our 40 bolivianos to buy tickets for 15 bolivianos and give them to us, and put us on the bus. Oh well... it happens...

At least we made it to La Paz, the second bus was on paved road and not overcrowded, and incredibly, it was on time. We arrived at La Paz at 7am on the dot, where we stayed at the bus terminal for only a couple of hours, while waiting for our next bus, which would take us to Copacabana, on Lake Titicaca...

And that's on another entry... :)