From Cuzco we took an overnight bus south to Puno. Puno sits at the northern end of Lake Titicaca, which is the world's highest navigable lake and is shared by Peru and Bolivia.
A short boat trip from Puno took us to the unique Uros islands. These floating islands (there are around 50 in total) are built using layers of buoyant reeds that are regularly replenished throughout each island's 20-year life span. The Uros people first moved on to Lake Titicaca hundreds of years ago to get away from Incan and other aggressors and have been living on the reed islands ever since. Although Uros culture certainly has been impacted by tourism, they still have many unique customs, such as electing a president for each island. The highlights of our visit were walking on the uneven surface (which took some getting used to), seeing a demonstration on how they build the islands, and riding a reed boat between islands.
A short boat trip from Puno took us to the unique Uros islands. These floating islands (there are around 50 in total) are built using layers of buoyant reeds that are regularly replenished throughout each island's 20-year life span. The Uros people first moved on to Lake Titicaca hundreds of years ago to get away from Incan and other aggressors and have been living on the reed islands ever since. Although Uros culture certainly has been impacted by tourism, they still have many unique customs, such as electing a president for each island. The highlights of our visit were walking on the uneven surface (which took some getting used to), seeing a demonstration on how they build the islands, and riding a reed boat between islands.
We also took a much longer boat trip to the island of Taquile, a more traditional island (excepting that it's almost four kilometers above sea level), with soil, rocks and a reasonably challenging ascent to its main village. One of the first things you notice on Taquile is that all of the locals are wearing elaborate headwear featuring differing shapes and pom poms pointed in different directions. At lunch we were told that the position and type of the headwear is used in much the same way as a gringo's Facebook relationship status to indicate whether the wearer is single, dating, married or 'it's complicated'. The advantage of Taquile being close to the centre of Lake Titicaca is that you get a true appreciation of how big the lake is. At times it was easy to imagine that we were looking at the Mediterranean sea rather than an inland high altitude lake.
Next stop was the Bolivian border, where Sam got a free pass into the country while Cindy paid $135 for a visa. Bolivians will tell you that their former president fled to the US with half the country's money, so perhaps they're slowly trying to claw it back from American tourists.
Just past the border was the small lakeside town of Copacabana, which inspired the naming of the much more famous (and we expect more picturesque) beach in Brazil. In Copacabana we wandered through the streets, visited the main cathedral and enjoyed some delicious local trout served with lake views from a street shack (which at $3 was the first of many memorable Bolivian cheap eats).
Just past the border was the small lakeside town of Copacabana, which inspired the naming of the much more famous (and we expect more picturesque) beach in Brazil. In Copacabana we wandered through the streets, visited the main cathedral and enjoyed some delicious local trout served with lake views from a street shack (which at $3 was the first of many memorable Bolivian cheap eats).
We then boarded a short, but interesting, bus trip to La Paz, featuring lake crossings (where we and our bus crossed on different vessels) and the most third world roads we'd encountered so far. There'll be more on La Paz (and interesting roads) in the next post.