After our time in Cusco we decided to head towards Bolivia. Rather than heading straight to La Paz we took an overnight bus to Puno in order to take a trip to see the floating reed islands on Lake Titicaca.

We arrived in Puno at 4am and booked into a hostel to get four hours more sleep before heading out on the worlds highest navigable lake.

We were the only two English speaking people on our small boat and luckily our guide gave us a brief trunkated explantion of everything he was saying in english. The boat ride to the first island took about 45 minutes and on the way we were taken out of the heavily poluted docks into the clean waters and reed beds of the lake. We were taken by a floating checkpoint and onto our hosts tiny island where we were treated to a demonstation of how the islands are made. The base of the island is made using the root system of the plentiful reeds in the area and then layer upon layer of fresh cut reeds are layed over this (approx 2 foot thick). The whole construction is then tied together with rope and the reed houses are ´placed on top. There you have it a floating island! These islands can be linked to others, they can be cut in two, and they can be detatched when the neighbours dont get along! Although these are ancient and traditional types of "tribe" that live on these structures the whole thing is sadly geared for the tourists with the local people more interested in selling you their minature reed boat souvenirs than going by their day by day lives. After we had resisted the temptation to buy a reed wind chime we got onto a man powered reed boat to take us to the main island. Of course this was an extra cost but they have to make their money out of us gringos somehow!

The main island has everything from a post office to a small reed hotel. We decided to grab some food at this point and treated ourselves to fresh lake trout which turned out to be farmed in small pools rather than caught wild but tasted delicious anyhow. After a quick meal it was back to the petrol powered boat back to the mainland so we could get our bus to Bolivia.