We have been very high in elevation over the past couple of weeks, visiting the highest navigable lake in the world (Lake Titicaca) and the highest capitol city in the world (La Paz, Bolivia). Usually the altitude gives people really bad headaches, but fortunately for us we’re men, so our smaller brains haven’t been affected that much.
We are now travelling to Arequipa, Peru. We have crossed paths with at least 50 other travelers during our time here and all of them have raved about how amazing Arequipa is, even if they’ve never been to it. So apparently we’re going to paradise, even though our bus is
gonna get there at 5:30 am tomorrow morning.
In Bolivia we were 4 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time (aka the time it is in Oregon). But we found out the other day that the place we are in Peru is only 3 hours ahead, and we found that out right before we went to bed, which was a great surprise. Surprise daylight savings times are the best.
We have spent the past couple of days being tourists. We visited the beautiful town of Copacabana, Bolivia; which had a great view of Lake Titicaca, from a mountain overlooking the city. Then we crossed the border to Puno, Peru; which is a port city on the Lake. All around lake Titicaca the mountains look like they are made of flat shelves, stacked on top of each other. Literally every mountain looks like that, after three days of seeing nothing but that I was starting to think that was just how the mountains here look. But our guide told us that it’s the result of over 2,000 years of farming on those hillsides. There are rocks everywhere, which were made into walls and terraces by the famously good masons of the empires of the past. The plethora of terraces are also maintained by their descendants, who still farm them to this day, and yes using the word “plethora” is fun.
From the port city of Puno we took a boat to a small floating island that was made entirely of roots and reeds. The people there also make their houses and boats out of reeds. Apparently these island inhabitants are descendants of people that fled the mainland from the Aymara, Inca, and Spanish empires. I’m not sure how many of these islands exist today, but we could see 4 other floating islands from the one we visited, which housed three families. I was surprised by how sturdy the island was, our feet never got wet, and it was even raining when we visited. The people there eat a lot of fish, and hunt ducks with an old black powder rifle. The islands are obviously surrounded by tons of reeds, which makes it a great building material, plus they also eat them. They tasted kind of like a mix of cucumber and celery, but according to our guide if you eat too much you’ll “lose your stomach.” Which was good news to me, because I don’t need much of an excuse to not eat vegetables.
From there we took a 3 hour boat ride to the island of Amantani, which is a real rock and dirt island. The island is about five miles in circumference, and has 10 separate communities on it, which are divided by hills and ravines. The island is one of the most beautiful and peaceful places I have ever visited. There are no cars, 3 horses, it’s surrounded by the blueness of the lake, and inside are quaint little communities with fields of crops surrounding them on the terraced hillsides. The people there were very friendly, we stayed with a family there overnight. At night they had a fiesta type thing, were they dressed all of us up in ponchos (we were with 20 other tourists) and the Peruvian beanies and we learned how to dance in their traditional way (Or to dance at all). It was a lot of fun making a fool of ourselves last night. Their traditional band was also really good, they use a lot of flutes here, and it sounds really unique and nice.
After we spent the night on the island of Amantani, we had breakfast with the family (bread and tea or coffee is the typical breakfast in Peru and Bolivia), then we said our goodbyes and sailed 2 hours to the next island, called Tiahuanaco (Or something like that, it starts with a “T”). This island is about twice as big, the island is large enough to support livestock, not just 3 horses like Amantani. They are also really good at stonework, and had stone buildings and arches everywhere. They even had large stone arches leading to restrooms. On both of the islands the people wove beautiful handicrafts out of alpaca and sheep wool, which I don’t know if I’d believe was handmade if I hadn’t seen it done. After we visited that island we sailed back to the port city of Puno, where we just ate an alpaca pizza for dinner. It tasted kind of like sausage, not too abnormal. Still on our list of things to eat are Llama and Guinea pig. Apparently Guinea pig is a delicacy here, because of how little meat is on it.
In a few hours we are taking a night bus to Cusco and then our destination of Arequipa, where we will arrive after 8 hours at 5:30 in the morning, and then we’re gonna take a shower and fall asleep, or the opposite, who knows, we’re crazy like that. I think that’s just about everything, here’s some pretty pictures…
