Puno

So we left Copacabana on time and arrived just 25 minutes later at the Bolivian border. About an hour after we'd originally arrived in Bolivia we'd met an Ozzy guy who'd told us that we should have gotten an immigration card at the border, but none of us passing through were offered one. He told us we'd be fined when we left the country, and it turned out he was right! Thanks to that Ozzy guy I was kind-of expecting this at the border, so I had a few Bolivianos to pay the fine (it was only 2Euro each, not like the 100Euro fine we had to pay for overstaying our visa in South Africa). So another lesson learnt, luckily a cheap one this time.

So back on the bus and after only another 15 minutes or so the bus just stops by the side of the road, and the guy tells us the bus is broken (he's holding a new fan belt in his hands), and that we'll have to wait for a replacement bus. 10 minutes later a small minivan shows up and we all transfer to that (the big comfy tour bus we were on was mostly empty). Sarah is getting really mad at this stage, as this is clearly a bit of a scam. The company deliberately park their big modern bus outside their office to attract business, but then once over the border they transfer everyone to small minibuses. But I didn't mind - we hadn't paid any extra for the big comfy bus, the minibus arrived quickly so we weren't really delayed, and the minibus itself was really comfy and modern anyway (and we still arrived in Puno half-an-hour early), but Sarah was still fuming at the rip-off-ness of it all (I guess she was still miffed at the border fine we had to pay too, it being another wee scam).

So we arrived at the bus terminal in Puno, and in fact Sarah was fairly adamant about just getting the next bus out of the town and moving straight onto Cuzco. But luckily I managed to persuade her we should at least check out the town a bit first. So after a stroll into the town we found a lovely hotel, Hotel Don Juan.

As we strolled around it turned out to be another lovely town with a nice buzz about it, and so we checked out the small but good coca museum. As demonstrated in the coca musuem in La Paz, the history of the humble coca leaf is fascinating. Of course it's famous these days for producing cocaine, and so the United States has been trying for decades to eliminate the crop from South American countries. But in fact the leaf has extremely important cultural meaning for many of the indigenious peoples here. It seems much of the continent is going through a cultural resurgence, with much pride being taken in their respective cultural histories and coca is a primary pillar of many of those cultures (being used for centuries without any ill-effect on the people, as they only chew the leaves, and don't process them to produce cocaine or anything, so the addictive effects are minimised and the benefical effects are many and varied). Anyway, fair play to them I say, so long as they can keep the cultural aspects of coca prominent and somehow prevent it being processed into cocaine or crack or whatever, and thereby morphing into the rampant drug problems eating away at Western cultures.

Anyway, we had a lovely Chinese dinner (no Indians unfortunately!), and an early night. Next morning we strolled down to the port early and hopped on a boat heading out to the Uros Islands on Lake Titicaca. This is actually a series of floating man-made islands, each constructed by the local indigenous Uros people from reeds that grow extensively around this part of the lake. It was pretty cool just jumping from our boat onto a floating bed of reeds, all very spongy and swishy underfoot, but very confortable of course. Each island is quite small really, supporting about four or five families, and they travel around using boats also constructed from the reeds. So we visited a couple of these islands, travelling at one stage on one of the local reed boats (having to pay extra for that of course!), and had a short explanation of the Uros way of life (in Spanish though, as we were the only Westerners on our boat), and then just spent time lounging around on the reeds, much as the locals seemed to be doing really.

That night there turned out to be a small festival in the town for some reason (having little or no Spanish meant we remained pretty clueless as to the festivals meaning). It was prey cool I thought with bands and dancing around a big stage set up in the main plaza, although Sarah went back to the hotel fairly early. I was keen to wait around and see them finish the huge bamboo tower they where constructing all night. It was being wired up with fireworks, and so I wanted to see it all kick-off. I waited around for a couple of hours, watching the bands and dancers, but it was getting really cold and it seemed obvious they weren't going to light the fireworks until midnight.

So I popped back to the hotel to warm up and came back just before midnight. Turned out my watch must have be a tad slow, as when I got back to the plaza I just caught a glimpse of the last of the fireworks going off, ah well...

We had booked our bus to Cuzco that day and so the next morning we got up early and after I went out for empanadas to have for breakfast and lunch on the bus, we caught a bicycle ricksaw (Puno being the first place I've seen them in South America), to the bus station. Sarah had been adamant again about us getting a far more expensive bus company for the 6 or 7 hour journey to Cuzco, but again I trusted my own intuition and went with a company I thought would be fine and that was a lot cheaper. Luckily I was right, and the cheap bus we got turned out to be really comfortable and the company didn't scam us in any way at all (it was the same company that kinda scammed us onto the minibus from Bolivia, but which I thought was justified since the original big tour bus was mostly empty anyway).

So we had a lovely three days in Puno, and luckily hadn't just passed straight through. The trip out to the Uros islands was well worth it, the town was lovely, and the small festival was a bonus. But now we were moving on to Cuzco, generally accepted as the gringo (i.e. tourist) capital of all South America, as it's the main staging post for getting to Machu Pichu and has numerous other famous archaeological sites nearby (and it's a very nice town in it's own right too!).