Saturday early morning I arrived in Puno by bus. This allowed me to take some beautiful sunrise pictures. From the bus terminal I then went directly to a two-day tour of the Lake Titicaca.
We first went to the Uros floating islands. The Uros build these islands of reeds. One island lasts about ten years. After that, they have to build a new island which takes about two months.
After visiting two of these islands we continued to the island Amantani. The trip there took us three hours on the boat. This island is the second-biggest on the lake after Isla de Sol. We were distributed to different families after arriving. We went to the family and ate lunch at their house. We then met our guide again to climb a mountain-top. From there we were able to watch the sunset. This is probably the first day where I have pictures of the sunrise as well as the sunset. In the evening we had a party where I learned a simple local dance. We spent the night at the families houses.
In the morning we went to the Taquile island which took us about one hour. We walked around the island, ate some really good fish at a restaurant and left for Puno again. After another three-hour trip we arrived there.
We were very lucky with the weather. While it is the rainy season, we had sun for almost the whole two days. So the long boat trips were really cool. Also I can especially recommend the Amantani island. It’s quite untouristic so far and you actually get to sleep at families houses. It’s culture is still very authenthic as tourism only came here five years ago. But how long this will last, I don’t know.
There is a map of the Lake Titicaca at Wikipedia. It shows you the position of the two islands Amantani and Taquile. It also shows how little of the lake we have actually navigated during this two days.
I am currently still uploading pictures and probably won’t get to upload all of them until returning to Lima next week. See all the current Lake Titicaca pictures.
