Lake Titicaca

Josh and I are back and resting after our enriching and exhausting journey to Puno and the islands of Lake Titicaca! After a 6.5-hour bus ride, we arrived in Puno at 4 am on Thursday, took a two-hour nap, and got ready to begin our lake adventure. We were on a boat with about twenty other tourists from around the world, and our tour guide, Walter, was a Puno native with an obnoxious speech pattern (probably the most annoying thing was his penchant to say "hm?" repeatedly - "This is Lake Titicaca, hm? We will arrive at our first stop in one hour, hm?" and so on.) Our first stop was one of the Uros Islands, islands that are man-made from reeds that grow in the shallow parts of the lake. The island we visited contained about five families, and they named their island community Manco Capac. On the island, our tour guide and the island leader gave us a demonstration on how the islands are made. Evidently each island lasts 20 years with regular upkeep, after which time they build a new island. The islanders also eat the reeds to maintain strong, healthy teeth sans toothbrushes. And, yes, we tried them, too ;) You peel back the green husk to reveal the edible white stalk. They tasted a little like celery and smelled like straw. Not terrible, but we were advised not to eat too much - apparently they wouldn't agree with our reed-ignorant stomachs.

After the demonstration, we were brought into the islanders' little reed huts and given time to explore and buy their hand-made crafts. My favorite items were little mobiles with tiny boats and little people figurines dangling from the center. Of course I had no use for them, but I thought they were so beautiful and dainty. And then I found out that they were matrimonial mobiles, ha. They had some nice looking jewelry and other crafts as well, but Josh and I are holding off on a lot of our purchases until we go to the highly recommended market in Pisac during our tour of the Sacred Valley. Finally, we got to ride around the lake on a reed boat - so cool! - before saying goodbye to the Uros Islands and setting off for our next island visit.

Lake Amantani was our final stop on Thursday, an island a few hours farther into the expansive cerulean lake. Our tour guide told us some interesting facts about the people on all of these islands. For example, they live by an old Incan creed, translated: "Don't lie, don't be a thief, don't be lazy," and, thus, there is no crime among them. Also, the people farm for their own subsistence, so tourism is their prime moneymaker. Upon arrival at Amantani, we tourists were divided into groups of about four and sent off with our island host families for lunch. Josh and I, along with a young Dutch couple, were met by Jacinto and led through our first uphill trek of the day to his family's house. Jacinto and his wife, Juli Sabina, had three children: a twenty-three year-old making his way in Puno, a pre-teen girl, and a six-year old boy who was quite a ham. Though our tour guide made a futile effort trying to teach us about 20 Quechua (ancient Inca language) words before we got off the boat, the people on the islands also speak Castellano (Spanish), so we were able to get by with some basic conversation with the family and locals.

Juli Sabina and her daughter prepared lunch for us, and I was struck by the distinctive gender roles in their culture. The males were served first, while the females prepared the next course, and Juli Sabina and her daughter didn't eat until everyone else was finished. Lunch consisted of two courses: quinoa (a popular Incan protein-rich grain) soup, and then a plate of vegetables (with potatoes, of course, as there are around 3,000 kinds of potatoes indigenous to Peru) and very salty fried Andean cheese. Meals are finished with a kind of mint tea for digestive health, at which time Jacinto and Juli Sabina brought out their work (hats, woven bracelets, rugs) for us to peruse. Josh and I bought two alpaca wool hats from them, and we were glad we had them later!

After lunch, we met the rest of the tour groups in the plaza to begin a hike to the highest point on the mountain island, chewing coca leaves to help with the altitude, where there were two Incan temples - Pacha Mama and Pacha Tata (Mother Earth and Father Earth) - and watched the sunset. At dinner that night, we again had a vegetable soup and then rice (a gift from the Dutch couple) with cooked vegetables and mint tea. Though worn out and so chilled, after dinner the family dressed us up in their traditional costumes and took us to a fiesta! It was a fun experience, and we were actually warm dancing around in our outfits. To fight the chill (there was no running water and little electricity on the island), we piled on blanket after wool blanket and fell asleep in a flash after our exhausting day.

In the morning, we awoke in perfect time, had pancakes with jam, made by Jacinto's daughter, and instant coffee before hiking back to the port. Though we wanted to get a picture with the whole family, Juli Sabina slipped into the kitchen when we suggested a photo! We said goodbye, and began the journey to our final island visit: Taquile Island.

Taquile Island is another island that thrives on the patronage of we tourists. Walter told us about the strict romance rules on Taquile. Men wear hats to distinguish the single from the married. Single men (and even the youngest boys) wear red and white hats, while married men have solid red hats. Likewise, the women have markers as well: single women have very large pompons on their shawls, while married women's pompons are much smaller. Upon turning sixteen, a resident of Taquile Island is allowed to have a boy/girlfriend. The next step is to have babies in the late teens, and they usually marry in their early twenties! Their reasoning for this chain of romantic events is that the islanders don't allow divorce. Family, love, and enjoying life is the main goal of the residents of all three islands, though their lives are hard.

Unfortunately, my camera ran out of battery power early in the day, so most of our Taquile photos were taken sparingly on Josh's dying phone camera. Our visit to Taquile began with another long hike up to the main plaza. In honor of Saint Sebastian, there was a festival taking place in the plaza, as well as a craft market, all for the benefit of we tourists, I'm sure, so we milled around for a while before our next hike up to a restaurant for lunch. Our restaurant, Pacha Mama (sensing a theme?), had a beautiful view of the lake and served us some pretty delicious food. We had, you guessed it, quinoa soup, and then a choice of fried or boiled trout, or an omelet with rice and fries. I got the fried trout (very lightly fried), and it was delicious! Josh got the omelet thinking that it also had trout in it, but it turned out to be just a vegetable omelet. We split the two dishes, and they were great! After eating, we had.......mint tea! That lunch concluded our visit to Taquile Island, so after our meal we began a hike up and then down the other side of the mountain to another port where our boat was waiting. We embarked on our 2.5-hour boat ride back to Puno, quite exhausted and with time to kill before our bus back to Cusco.

In Puno, Josh and I took a cab to the Plaza de Armas and scouted out restaurants, bars, internet cafes, and ways to passively kill time. We attempted to have a snack at a restaurant, which got part of our order wrong, was freezing, and had terrible service, so we set out to find another time-killer. The internet cafes were cramped and uncomfortable, so we passed those up and tried to have ice cream in a heladeria with comfy couch seating. I ordered an oreo sundae, and Josh got a choco-coco sundae, but the girl put weird peach syrup in the bottom of our ice cream cups (not in the picture), and so our ice cream tasted strange. So, we left, yet again in search of a temporary haven. We ambled down a more bustling road off the plaza, read potential dinner menus, and stumbled upon a rock and reggae bar called Positive. Inside, it was dimly lit with pictures, posters, letters from customers, country flags, and had black light areas. We sat underneath a Bob Marley painting with the bar's name in it, on tree-stump stools next to the brick oven. We found our spot! They even had a free bathroom with toilet paper in it (very rare here). Josh and I had a few beers, tried a very strange vodka martini, and had some decent pizza (though no Pizza Carlo) before heading back to the bus station. We had a closer to seven-hour bus ride home, as our bus stopped several times for whatever reason, and arrived back in Cusco around 4:30 am. While we did sleep some on the bus (first class on the way home, too!), we crashed back at our house and have been taking in easy all day.

Though tired, Josh and I are gearing up for the Sacred Valley tour tomorrow, and next weekend: Machu Picchu! We have hit the halfway point of our Peruvian adventure. It's crazy, but we're glad that we still have two weeks here! Many more exciting things to come.