Hi Everyone Well as most of you know my birthday was a total disaster, didnt even celebrate it- mucho depressing. So im going to be like the Queen and have a second birthday when claire is fit and well and i can party!! The next day we decided to leave Cusco and took a coach 6 hours to Puno, which is higher than Cusco and sits right on top of Lake Titicaca. I have to admit that both of us were more than a little reluctant to get off the coach when we arrived. It looked like a total building site and after the last week of treks and illness neither of us were that keen to arrive into a hole!!! As soon as we got off we were whisked away by 2 very enthusiastic women, and put in Pousada Real where our room came complete with holey ceilings and flooding loo- but for 1.89 a night we couldnt complain!! The centre of Puno is actually quite bustly with lots of restaurants and several squares with pretty trees and churches but on the whole it is probably the grottiest place we{ve been to so far. So we booked onto the tour trip the next day so as to move on asap! We got on our tour boat with a Peruvian man called Zach who looked like a chunky 4ft peruvian crocodile dundee. He was very entertaining, he was born along with 14 other sibling up in the mountains and his family are still very traditional. He said at 15 he was presented with a cow a llama and a hut and his wife! The first island we stopped at was Uros which is a floating reed island. It was so strange stepping off the boat onto a spongey bouncing surface. The whole island sits on a bed of flattened reeds and there are these tiny communities living on them with their huts and stoves and boats all woven out of the reeds. Some of the other reed islands have the local schools on them, it was really fascinating, but i have no idea how these people exist on this tiny island, it was about 20x10m. The men on Uros had built this amazing boat for the tourists to take a trip to another neighbouring village, it was two stories high with these huge puma heads at the front and they rowed our whole boat load over ( about 25 of us). The Uros people have all died now, but there are Andean people who live on the islands, there used to be hundreds but theyre gradually depleting because the children go to hugh school on the mainland and dont return. We then took a 2 hour boat ride across Lake Titicaca, which is just soooo much bigger than i had ever imagined. We were told that its called Titicaca because Titi means Puma and Caca means stone. Pumas are big over here, along with Condors and Alpacas, everything is named or designed based on their shape. After 2 hours we arrived on Taquille island which is very pretty and relatively unchanged for centuries. The island is divided into 4 with stone walls and Inca doorways markign out the 4 areas. There are separate communities with their own leaders in each one ( or at least this was the set up) and the people on the island live off the produce of the island and fish from Titcaca. There are no animals on the island other than sheep and the people were very traditional with their dress. The women only wore red skirts with black head dresses no hats and there are different size tassles on their shawls to show if they{re married. The men all have different hats for day hats, married and single, and if theyre high up within their community. There was nothing on the island other than their homes and a few ramshackle restaurants and their church. We stopped for lunch ont he roof of a restaurant and had fish caught from Lake Titicaca, the scenery was so stunning and still it looked like a painting, i will have to get mypics up here! Today we got the bus to Arequipa 6 hours away towards the coast. We{re both feeling a bit shattered with all the moving, but there are still so many things to do in each place. WE{re hoping to go to Colca Canyon adn see the famous condors and santa catalina convent and there is a mummy museum that is meant to be very interesting. So plenty to see!! HOpe u are all well tasha xx