...and leave the rest for Bolivia"

I lost the writing I'd done over the past week or two. I'll see what I can do to catch things back up now. I left off with us arriving in Puno in Southern Peru to visit Lake Titicaca, a childhood dream of Dair's and the cause of laughter amongst children in geography classes everywhere. Titicaca is the highest lake in the world and Puno sits at about 3800m above sea level. All this really meant was that we were both very easily winded and got too much sun, too quickly.

We spent a night in the city and then booked ourselves on a two-day tour of the islands on the lake. The first stop was the Uros Islands, also called the Islas Flotantes (floating islands). These consist of approximately 40 man-made islands that sit about one kilometer off the shore of Puno. They're made of reeds and various plant life and vegetation. The number of islands changes from year to year because when a family starts feuding, they simply cut the island in half and float away from each other; that's certainly one way to deal with your issues. Being on the islands was very reminiscent of standing on a floating dock at the cottage, except the people were much more colorfully dressed and wanted to sell us stuff. We traveled from one island to the next on reed boats that looked something like giant canoes made of hay and got our passports stamped with the words "Titicaca".

The next stop on the tour was an island called Amantani. We were to spend the night there in a home-stay situation. As luck would have it, we were assigned the only home with electricity. I'm okay with losing some of the "authentic experience" that our friends had in exchange for not peeing in the dark. That night the islanders organized a fiesta for us. They invited the local panpipe band and dressed us up in traditional clothing. We renamed ourselves Pedro and Sofia and got ready to boogie. Apparently the Amantani dances are very similar to steps from our own culture, so we channeled our inner Jews and pulled our shy companions up for a giant hora-esque type of scene. I'm sure you'll all be shocked to hear that we were the life of the party!

The next day we stopped at a small island called Tequile for far longer than was necessary, took some pictures, ate some lunch, stared at the empty Plaza de Armas for awhile and then took a painfully slow and long boat ride back to the mainland. We had an early night due to our very upset bellies (the locals were not especially careful with what they fed us on the islands) and our super early wake up for our bus ride to La Paz, Bolivia. This was our first completely unplanned stop. Bolivia was never on the agenda, yet when we heard it was only five hours to the capital, it only seemed logical to head off in the wrong direction from where we needed to be.

We arrived at the bus station to purchase our tickets, and I asked the woman how long the journey would take "It's two hours to the border, one hour at the border and another three hours to La Paz. So seven hours." I asked her to clarify and she repeated the same information. Apparently they do a different kind of math in Peru, but ours is not to question why.