I woke up at 6:30 after an amazing full night of sleep! I had a dream that The Shins came out with a new album and it was kind of experimental. I really liked the album and I made a copy for Leah Plisko (with whom I share a great love of The Shins in real life) but then I didn't see her for a long time. So by the time we got together she had already bought the album but she didn't like it that much.
I took a nice hot shower with great water pressure and we went downstairs for the continental breakfast. It was pretty much like yesterday, maybe slightly better. How can they give their guests such stale toast??
We headed out for a trip to the Uros floating islands on Lake Titikaka. At the dock, they have a bunch of paddle boats that you can rent and ride around in a little bay area. The shapes of the boats were neat and kind of funky.
It was a beautiful day,
the boat ride was nice.
We were grateful for the sunglasses, we had been right about the bright sun!
We were sitting right next to the engine, though, and it was really stinky. Chris was afraid we were going to get carbon monoxide poisoning but we escaped relatively intact.
The Uros people live on islands built with dried reeds,
the reeds grow in the lake and they use them to make the islands as well as their boats and homes.
Once we arrived on an island, we had a lesson about the Uros people from one of the guys who lives on the island.
He told how the Uros people used to live on land and built reed boats to escape the Inca, and lived on them for months. Then went back to the land but later used the reed boats again to escape the Spanish and finally ended up building the islands. Something else about how they are built on dirt but I didn't quite get all of that about the structure of the islands. (He did it all in Spanish.)
They also use long poles to anchor the islands in place so they don't end up in Bolivia and have to get new passports. (That part I definitely understood.)
It was cool to see these islands and the people living on them.
They use solar power to charge batteries, then they use the power for important stuff like watching TV. If I didn't have much power TV would be one of the first things to go! Then they practiced the ancient Uros ritual of selling souveneirs to tourists.
We bought a couple of items. Then we all got to ride in the boat to another island.
There are about 45 of the floating islands.
At the other one they sold food and postcards and (guess what) more souveneirs.
We also climbed up onto a lookout tower.
Then after awhile the stinky boat took us back.
I applied sunscreen multiple times but still got burns on top of the jungle/Macchu Pichu burns. The worst was the top of my head, it didn't even occur to me to cover it at first. Later I put on my bandana. We did a little shopping, then had a yummy lunch.
I had fried kingfish,
and Chris had delicious stuffed chicken.
We had an appetizer of cheese which was SO good and very much like something Chris makes with mozzarella.
They have a thick, salty, rubbery cheese that is used in many dishes out there that makes your teeth squeak (C says its like fresh cheese curds).
It is really good, we're going to look for it out here but I don't really know what its called.
Chris rested for a while at the hotel and I went out for more shopping!
I was determined to finish getting souveneirs, and I got almost all of them. The price variation was so wild - everything looked pretty much the same in many of the shops, so I don't know how it works but I doubt if they pay wildly different prices for things. For example I would try to buy a scarf at one place and they would give me a hard time if I tried to give them less than 40 soles, but the next place would quickly go down to 15 or 20 soles. But everything is pretty cheap anyway, it is almost painful to haggle so much for $1-2 difference.
It started to rain just as I got back to the hotel,
and it was raining pretty hard, but we headed out anyway and picked up some sanwiches and cakes at Rico Pan. That's a bakery which was a chain, we saw a few locations in Puno. Then headed to the supermarket for some water and beer. We always bought huge bottles of water and then would pour into our metal water bottles (thanks, Jaz!) to take with us all day. We ate dinner in our hotel room and watched a movie about the Governator Arnold about cloning. I think it is a holiday, I always see Epiphany Day on the calendar. I don't know what it means but everyone in town was carrying around these small fancy basket/basinette looking things with a baby doll inside it. We went to sleep looking forward to heading for the beach the next day!
Costs:
2 boat tickets to Uros S/20
2 entrance tickets to the Uros island S/10
2 for the boat ride from one island to another on a reed boat S/10
lunch S/75
dinner S/25
beer and water S/25
phone card S/3
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