Lago Titicaca

After Cusco, Christie, Megan and I headed to Puno, Peru to tour Lake Titicaca. It was a short overnight bus ride, so we arrived at about 4:30am. We found a hostel, got a room, grabbed a couple of hours of sleep, then headed out to a full day tour of Lake Titicaca.

The most famous attraction on the lake near Puno are the floating islands. Our boat took us out the islands where we received a demonstration of how the islands are constructed:

Got a chance to taste the edible part of the reeds that make up the islands:

Megan took the opportunity to pick up a native child:

And we were give a musical send off in Spanish, English and Aymara:

We road what the tour guide repeatedly and jokingly referred to as "the mercedes benz" reed boat on a short trip to another of the floating islands:

Then we hopped back on the motorboat for the 2.5 hour trip out into the main body of the lake to Taquile island. Safety first:

Taquile island was pretty small. We ate lunch, listened to a sales pitch about the importance of buying local crafts from the Aymara on the island, walked back down to the port and headed home.

The lake was very pretty, but the tour was a bit disappointing. The people on both the floating islands and Taquile obviously live completely off of revenue from tourists now. The crafts they sold appeared very similar to items that were available on land in Puno and in many of the other towns I have visited, but cost about three times as much. It's an incredibly unique place, but it felt as though it has been taken over completely by the tourism industry.

We returned to the hostel, figured out that electric water heater was shorted to the hot water knob (not fun), stayed the night, then headed off to Bolivia!