Puno & Lake Titicaca

Blogger isn´t liking my pictures right now, but I´ve uploaded some to my flickr site.

We´re in Cusco now, but we spent the last several days in Puno and visited Lake Titicaca. We flew into Juliaca very early in the morning, because the air gets too thin as the day goes along, and the planes cannot land or take off safely. Niiiice! Very arid dry area in the mountains...and very high!

Puno is a town of about 19,000 but I would have thought more than that. We visited the floating islands called the Uros. It´s comprised of 25 islands, each island having about 7-10 families. They´ve lived like this for several hundred years. It´s fascinating. Everything they make is out of reeds. It takes them about 3-4 weeks with 7-8 people to make on of their boats, which will last about 1 and a half years. They also eat the bottom part of the reeds.

We wandered around Puno for several days, getting used to the altitude. It was about 12,000 feet...a bit more. Yesterday we drove down to Cusco, a town of about 1 million. We´re right next to the famous square. Just beautiful. The mountains are amazing, the terraces that go up for hundreds and hundreds of feet. And they were man made! We visited an Incan site that had funary towers. Again, fascinating and beautiful. I was the only one brave enough to crawl into the little hole that was the entrance to the tomb. I could stand up inside, but barely. After a long time in the bus (about 8 hours or so) we arrived in Cusco. It´s a huge city, so of course not all of it is beautiful. But the area we´re in is.

So we´re here for a few days, and then off for our trek for 8 days.