On towards Lake Titicaca
8:20 pm on the 9th of November, 2005We awoke in Arequipa and quickly left the hotel in an arranged taxi for the bus station. The taxis in Arequipa are the tiniest in the world, like the Daewoo Matiz but a little bit smaller, there was just enough room for the driver, me, Morven, and our two rucksacks but only just. Once we got to the bus station we found another thing that works differently in Peru - queuing, in that it doesn’t work, if you go to a desk and wait behind the persons being served then you will wait all day, if you want to get somewhere you have to go straight up to the desk and start giving orders straight away, but we learned quickly and found oursleves a cheap ticket to Puno, on the edge of Lake Titicaca. It was a pretty horrendous journey all told. This was the day when altitude sickness really hit me for the first time so a lot of hours sitting in a cramped seat with loudmouth Peruvians behind talking loudly and kicking the seat wasn’t really ideal but we made it there with only a few stops to let street peddlers on to sell their wares - mostly nasty looking fruit. Unfortunately the people selling pastries and bread rolls didn’t come one, I could have really done with something like that.
Anyway we made it to Puno, and with a firm idea of where we wanted to stay for the night we braved the outside of the terminus to find a taxi. The very first person we saw was a nice smiley woman with what looked like Kevin Keegan’s hair, without the time to even think about declining we found ourselves in her car and on our way to our hotel. ‘Where are you staying?!’ She asked incredulously, ‘Oh no, that’s very expensive, come stay with me.’ So we did. The more we talked to this woman the more pies it seemed she had her fingers in. Shops, restaurants, boat tours onto the lake, buses to Cusco or Arequipa, jungle expeditions, you name it, she sold it. And without further ado we arranged a room, booked oursleves onto a tour to Los Islas Flotantas (the floating Islands made of reed), a night on Amantani, then a stop on Taquile before returning to Puno. All of this for the princely sum of ?8 including accomodation and food.
By now I was feeling a bit better and suggested we go out for dinner, so I got to eat Alpaca steak again. Turned out not to be a good idea to have eaten anything though - we both made it back to the hotel before throwing up. The restaurant was really nice despite us not being able to cope with food at the time - each table got a bucket placed beside them, filled with lamp oil and then lit - warmed you up a treat! Next time - Lake Titicaca - if you got here and don’t see your reflection in it’s waters then you will live an unfulfilled life. So the story goes anyway…
