When I was in elementary school, lake Titicaca definately was one of the highlights of our geography classes. Not because of its unique location at more than 3800m above sea level, making it one of the highest commercially navigable lakes in the world neither by being the largest lake in South America - it was its name that made it so popular! Titicaca in German sounds pretty indecent for a first grader and of course we enjoyed it to the full! I never actually thought that I would ever travel to the shores of this indecent sounding lake or even staying on one of its islands! But that's exactly what I'm going to do tomorrow!
After two days of "market research", at the port, online, consulting my Lonely Planet and fellow travelers I finally booked a tour to the floating islands and two other islands on lake Titicaca with "Juan from the Port", a funny guy from Uros, the floating islands, who speaks a bit of German, French and Portuguese and non-stop called me Señorita Beatriiiiiiiiiiz. I got his contact from his cousin, who runs the reed lodge on Uros and whom I had contacted via mail. It seems that at this time they don't receive many mails and when I arrived at the office everybod knew about Señorita Beatriiiiiiiz and her arrival. So tomorrow morning I'll go to the floating islands of Uros and stay there one night in the reed lodge, from there I'll continue to the island of Amantani where I'll stay with a local family and on the third day I'll visit the more touristic island of Taquile and get back to Puno. For boat transport, accomodation, meals and entrance to the islands I paid 95 soles, about 31 USD - as far as my research shows this price can't be beaten.
Puno itself has not much to offer in terms of sights and activities but it is a welcome relief after touristic Cusco - its a "real" Peruvian town with a lively market district businesses of all kinds and not just an "open-air museum" of fake-Peruvian culture. There are a lot of places with cheap internet access, cheap handycrafts and knitted stuff and of course laundries and "salas de belleza"to get your laundry and yourself back in shape. I especially like the central market hall and the street market near to the port - for a couple of cents you can eat your way through prickly pears, chese empanadas, peaches and a lot of other Peruvian "fast food". And for a few dollars I bought a thermos flask, a handknitted fluffy alpaca wool jumper, sock and gloves to prepare for my trip to the islands - it does get pretty cold at night here!
After spending about one week in Cusco, just one gringa among many, I have to get used to standing out in the crowd again here in Puno ;-) The "holas", funny comments and smiles on the street are back - but definately in a nice and funny way.
Yesterday I visited the Temple of Fertility in Chucuito. To get there you have to take one of the collectivos, stopping every 500m to take on or off passengers and their belongings - fishes, gas flasks, paint... The temple is pretty small but unintentionally very funny! It consists of a small walled patch of land full of stone willies of all kinds of sizes and shapes. The biggest and most explicit one is at least 1,60m high. You have to pay 5 soles entry and a little kid will show you around and tell you the history of the temple. As it seems those kids have learned the stone-willy story by heart and recite it with incredible speed, picking up pace, swalloing letters and words and giving each others signs on who will go where next. I had a very hard time keeping a straight face - the stone williescombined with the little girl and her breakneck speed version of the williehistory were just so much more fun then Machu Picchu ;-) I managed to ask her to take a picture of me and the super willie and then had to leave not to burst out laughing on the sacred site! If we had known in elementary school that lake Titicaca not only sounded indecent but also had stone willies on offer - I guess we would have blackmailed our teacher to take us there on our next school excursion ;-)
In the afternoon I wrote some postcards, send home some stuff by mail, picked up my laundry, did some research on bus tickets to Bolivia and continued reading "El Peregrino" by Paulo Coelho... one of those typical "pit stop days" I usually do when arriving in a new city :-)
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