Puno y Lago Titikaka de Peru, 21 de Noviembre

Walking to Peru..........

Another easy border crossing coming from La Paz to Puno.This time with a little exercise in the midst of the bus trip. After being stamped out of Bolivia, we all walked 400m along the Lago Titikaka border into Peru to then queue for our entrance visa.


Just a very brief blog entry here as this is where we subscribed to speed tourism. We arrived into Puno at lunchtime, spent the afternoon on the Uros Islands and then left excitedly for Cusco the following morning.

Islands, that are actually now moored to the mainland.

Lake Titikaka is famous for being the highest navigable lake in the world (3810m) and the largest in South America, shared by Bolivia and Peru. We opted to solely visit the Peruvian side of the lake.
Basically hundreds of boats offer trips to 2 or 3 of the various Totara-reed Islands - which is precisely what we did.

An island President giving us a lecture on the very buoyant
Totara-reed construction used for the islands.

Originally these islands were created out in the lake as a defense mechanism for isolation and protection against invasion. The idea being that they could be moved and cut down in size if a threat occurred.  



Visiting Uros Islands was one of those things you just have to see, however it is clearly all for the tourists. The locals claim and portray the image that they still live full-time on the islands, however it is very obvious that they don't.  

Lake Titikaka is very beautiful but is severely littered which was a shame to see, especially seeing the locals firing rubbish off the roof deck as we sailed along. It really highlights how successful the Keep NZ Beautiful campaign is!

All this said, the islands were amazing to see. They were especially strange to walk on, at times very nearly getting a foot in the drink. Each of the islands have their own fish pond (or fish farm) suspended directly into the lake. The reed crafted boats were the most impressive creations; it was classic jumping onto one which was then pushed by a fat kid in dinghy sporting a 2.5hp outboard!

Uros Islands speed tourism: tick, it was now two very excited tourists heading off towards Cusco as Machu Picchu and some form of Inca trail awaited.