The floating islands of Puno

After fully recovering in Cusco, it was time to move on again. We headed south to Puno which is a tiny port on Lake Titicaca. Lake Titicaca is the world’s largest high altitude lake. The lake was so vast it really felt like you were by the coastline but really you were at 3800m above sea level in land locked Bolivia!!

From Puno we headed out to the floating islands of the Uros people on Lake Titicaca. The floating islands (62 in all) were very unusual. They were built by the Uros people who wanted to escape the Inca/Spanish rules of the mainland. Apparently they are very lazy people and don’t like to be forced to work and it did feel like they did things at their own pace on the island. The islands were built using layers of buoyant totora reeds. The people used the reeds for pretty much everything; building their houses and boats, food, firewood and handicrafts. They were very friendly people and had a great sense of humour. They had a competition with our group to see who could guess the depth of water below their island. The prize was a mini reed boat and Tom came the closest at 15m. We got on one of the reed boats for a quick trip to the next island and 2 of the girls sang us off to row row row your boat!! Very weird in a Peruvian accent!!