Peru, Puno & Lake Titicaca, (written from Cusco) Wednesday 24th October

Tours everywhere, and I´m on one too... The shame of it! Oh the endless nights of stilted conversation at dinner time with people you would never choose to spend so much time with. What an odd way to travel. Some of my fellow passengers are tour veterans and never leave their country without having someone with their name on a placard waiting at the other end with an exact itinerary for the next 4 weeks. It is bringing out the rebel in me. Last night I was forced to adopt some new people purely to oil the joints of conversation once again. Carla continues to be a salvation and I am told I am not allowed back into Cusco unless I have collected a respectable amount of new play mates for us to party after the Inca Trail.
We have been joined by two Canadian girls, doctors, who have turned out to be drabness personified and refuse to eat, drink or , for the most part, talk. Yawn. Jo and Daniel continue to be the winging duo (thankfully Daniel takes my teasing graciously), John trots about after us all, hand to his ear trying to catch what is going on and I stride on ahead impatiently, looking for means of escape.

But enough of my moaning, I am a very lucky girl, I have seen a huge amount in the past few weeks, have had lots of fun and am planning to desert in a week anyway.

Continuing with the update. We crossed over the boarder into Peru from Bolivia on Sunday 21st. Most of the day was spent driving alongside Lake Titicaca, the world´s highest navigable lake. Flat farmland lay between the lake and the mountains which climbed the mountains on the Peruvian side by means of ancient terraces, some dating back to the Incas. We passed simple little farming settlements with mud brick houses and straw roofs and arrived in Puno late in the afternoon. Puno is a small lakeside city with brown buildings, tidy, narrow streets (tuk-tuks buzzing up and down) and some nice colonial buildings. Usually it is a tourist thoroughfare and the streets are full of the usual tourist gubbins, but we arrived to a ghost town. They were having their National Census and consequently the whole town was essentially under house arrest until 6.00pm that evening.
We ventured out after the appointed hour to find the streets beginning to liven up. After another dull dinner Carla produced coupons for free drinks from the bar upstairs and we proceeded to dance non-stop for 4 hours, dragging our reluctant companions with us and requesting Elvis for John who turned out to be a rather nifty jiver. Salsa lessons, the YMCA and the usual Shakira wiggling and it was high time for our bed...

We were up early, as usual, the next day and taken in a caravan of rickshaws to the port where we bought presents of rice and sugar for our ´families´ and joined the other pink, sun-hatted tourists on a boat bound for the reed islands.

Centuries ago the Uros people struck out for the middle of the lake to escape the warring Inca and Colla tribes on the shore, they adapted remarkably and having been living on floating reed islands ever since. There are between 5 and 10 families on each island and they have a shelf life of around 10 years before they have to be rebuilt.

We putted up to an island and were greeted cheerily by our hosts who stood in a line shaking our hands as we disembarked. They still live in reed huts, although they now have solar panels which provide them with electricity. Their main income is fishing and tourism and, I have to say, I was a little disheartened to see quite how many boats laden with tourists there were parked at each of the islands. The whole thing felt a little staged. But charmingly so. Our guide gave us a lively history lesson aided (or not as the case may be) by a little girl who relished the attention of these strange white visitors and nearly drove the guide to distraction, climbing all over over him and his presentation and distracting us by just being so damn cute. Little monster.

We were shipped to another island, via traditional reed boats, joining a flotilla of other bobbing sun hats and whirring cameras, where we were encouraged to buy an array of handicrafts. Then we were back on our motor boat for a 3 hour ride deep into the heart of Titicaca and the island where we were to spend the night.
We were all assigned ´mothers´ from the group of traditionally dressed women squinting at us from the shade and were lead off to our ´homes´ for the night huffing and puffing up paths that wound past little houses, gardens, meadows of grazing sheep and little babbling streams. Jo, Daniel, John and myself were grouped together.
The families that take in tourists have adapted their homes accordingly, providing proper toilets (although no running water) comfy beds in separate rooms and electricity. The rest of the family seemed to live in comparative simplicity, eating by candle light and washing out of buckets (as we saw the 2 boys doing cheefully in the morning sunshine). We were given lunch of vegetable soup, potatoes and squeaky cheese in our rooms and left to rest for a while until ´Mum´ poked her head around the door and said "Vamenos?" She then lead us slowly, crocheting all the way, to the soccer court where there were about 40 other tourists ambling about awaiting further instructions. We were scooped up by our guide again and taken up the hill to a sacred sight and to witness the sunset over Titicaca. A little shaky from the altitude, we devoured hot chocolate and descended again in time for dinner with our ´families´.
We ate a dinner of soup, potatoes and onions in their tiny kitchen, watched curiously by their youngest son, a little boy of about 10, and Daniel and I attempted a patchy conversation in our limited Spanish.
Time for another rest and then ´Mum´ reappeared and solemnly dressed Jo and me up in the traditional garb: 2 knee length, full skirts (usually they were at least 5), an embodied blouse, a tight cummerbund and long black scarf to cover our heads. They boys emerged from the other room wearing woolly hats that covered their ears and ponchos and we were lead to the ´fiesta´: A room full of giggling tourists taking pictures of one another. The musicians appeared and we spent a funny couple of hours dancing to cheery Peruvian pipes, drums and guitar music. Our ´families´ dutifully invited us to dance and stood twirling us around or leading us on a dizzying turn of the room in a long line gathering speed as the music dictated.

Pancakes were wafted under our noses early the following morning to wake us up and we bid farewell to our hosts and set off for Taquile Island for lunch. The island has a few pretty squares, rolling trails, a few pre-Inca ruins, simple houses and terraces, gorgeous scenery, and not much else. We spent a quiet few hours there before the 3 hour boat ride back to Puno.
I had adopted some new friends and brought them along to dinner with us, which cheered things up hugely.

Today: Cusco and the beginning of our Amazon and Inca Trail adventures...