From the blog’s perspective, we have just arrived in Peru to the city of Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, but in reality we have been in Peru for a few weeks. However, spending 4 days on the Inca Trail, 5 days in the Amazon jungle, and 4 days in the Peruvian mountains, none of which have Wi-Fi, meant the blog fell behind a bit. Throw in a few travel days to reach all those places and I have some catching up to do.
We didn’t explore Puno itself too much, just the blocks around this plaza with the cathedral which our hotel overlooked. Instead Puno was more of a base point to do some excursions from. One change from Bolivia was that there was suddenly a lot of these little “moto-taxis”. It is definitely the preferred cheap mode of transportation. In Bolivia, we saw a lot more of just motor cycles that would taxi people around. Given the amount of rain we experienced Peru, it kind of makes sense for them to have it covered.
Sillustani
On our first excursion we spent an afternoon at a pre-Incan historical site call Sillustani. It is situated on this peninsula in the middle of a lagoon. The site was determined to be primarily a burial site, most likely for royal families. The tombs were tall cylinder towers, and maybe its disrespectful, but they kind of looked like coffee thermoses to me.
Uros (Floating Islands)
We started our next day early with a short boat ride from Puno to the floating islands just outside of Puno. These are a relatively “new” development (compared to Sillustani) and we learned that the floating islands are in essence old refugee camps. When the Spanish arrived in the area, they started to use the Indigenous people as slave labour. Some fled the Spanish on their reed boats and hid in the expansive reed system to avoid the Spanish. They lashed boats together and started to build reed houses on them, improving and developing techniques to survive on the lake. With Peru gaining independence, the original motivator was removed but it stayed as a way of life for the people that lived there. However, it is a tough life and few young people choose to stay, so the community is shrinking and now its primary source of income is tourism.
Our guide explained a bit of how they build the islands now. They take about 1 meter of reed root which floats like a cork. These are cut into cubes and then have a stake driven into them and are the lashed together so they are all linked but can bob independently just a little bit. They then put up to 2 meters of cut reeds on the top. They need to replenish on a regular basis and we saw them hauling some fresh reeds in as well. You could definitely tell they were floating blocks, especially when a boat went by. Both Julia and I thought the same thing: it was a bit like walking on straw bales as each block would wiggle a little.
Amantani Island
When we looked at the description of this excursion, it had said we would spend the night on an island with an Indigenous family. We incorrectly thought this would be on the floating islands. Instead, we took a longer boat ride further into Lake Titicaca to visit two other islands. The first island was Amantani and is where we spent the night with a local family, which was a great cultural experience.
Women dressed in traditional clothing met us at the dock and took each family/couple from our tour group to their house for a homestay. We definitely had the youngest girl (Salina), who walked us to her family home. She picked a bit of leaf of a plant on our way up the hill to her house – we had it later in tea – muña. It was delicious and had a minty and chamomile type of flavour.
The house was definitely bigger than we expected – 3 rooms for tourists and a bathroom (with no toilet seat and manual flush), but a teeny, tiny, dark, dirt floor kitchen. Still, the mother made delicious food for us there. We had quinoa soup and potatoes/rice/cheese for lunch. When we were done eating, she brought out her knitting and crocheting and showed us her work. Annika bought a purple headband with butterflies on it, made from baby alpaca.
On the island was two peaks, one of which had an old Incan temple on top. We got to climb to the top to view the sunset. The views were good, even though it was windy and cold up there!
We headed back down before it got really dark to have dinner with our host family. During dinner she asked if we wanted to go to the “fiesta” at the community center. Mind you, they didn’t speak much English, and we don’t speak much Spanish so maybe something got lost in the Google Translation but it turns out “fiesta” means us putting on traditional costumes and going dancing. Inspecting the details and quality of the hand sewn fabric was worth it, even though the “dancing” bit stretched us all a bit.
The next morning, after breakfast, our host mom brought us down to the docks to send us on our way.
Taquile Island
Our next stop was just the next island over. There was an actual plaza on this island, and just like Amantani Island, it looks all quite well kept up with bigger homes. We actually went farther than we needed to and did an extra climb up to an outlook that had several crosses. We had a beautiful view of Amantani Island, Lake Titicaca and the snow-capped mountains in Bolivia.
Our tour group stopped for lunch at a house/restaurant where we were served Canadian Lake Trout from Lake Titicaca. I’ve often heard of the different invasive species coming into Canada, but I really hadn’t thought about it much the other way around.
Part of the stop was also more learning about the local culture and methods. There is a lot of sheep on the islands and the owner demonstrated the traditional way of cleaning wool. He had a part of a cactus plant that he crushed to a pulp and added a bit of water. He wrapped this all up in a cloth that he then squashed in his hand until it got really foamy. This foam was then rubbed into the wool and it was quite effective at cleaning it. Next the wife demonstrated the weaving they did to make the complicated belts/waste bands for the men. It takes them a month to make one.
With the boat trip back to Puno to end the day, we had one more night in Puno before we headed north. We didn’t take any food pictures but highlights of Puno was a wood fired pizzeria that served interesting pizza combinations (one had alpaca steak on it), a restaurant with both an amazing alpaca ravioli and a scrumptious passion fruit cheese cake, and our discovery of Inka Cola which is a soda that is a bit like cream soda.