Floating in your sleep.

Waking early in the morning after 5 days of hardship and quite a few beers to celebrate our survival, we wished that we had planned to spend the day sleeping and relaxing in the little bars and cafes of Cuzco. However we had decided to catch an early morning bus to Puno, a little town on the edge of Lake Titicaca which is the largest lake over 2000m in the world at a staggering 3820m. Puno itself is not a very remarkable place but it´s the only place to get boats out to the islands on the lake. We had decided that we were going to try and stay on one of the islands if we could.

So with no information about where we could stay or how we could stay there we jumped on a boat and sailed off. We spent several hours visiting the remarkable floating islands. These are islands that are made out of thousands of tons of water reeds and actually float on the lake. The locals put new reeds on top all the time to replace the reeds at the bottom of the island that rot and fall off. The texture resembles a soggy mattress and it feels like you're walking on the moon, very strange.



We liked the islands so much that we decided that we would stay there for the evening. With our Spanish skills (or lack of them) we managed to get ourselves a tee pee like hut for the night, made from guess what.....more reeds! We had a lovely afternoon relaxing and "talking" to the locals. My famous "screwing the finger off" trick (thanks for that one Uncle Mick, it scares children all around the world. Just like it used to scare me!!) came out again to astonish / scare the children and I think it almost got me burned for witchcraft!! After an evening of miming and getting very confused it was time to get our first good nights sleep for ages. As you can imagine we were so happy to find that the mattress was made of......... REEDS arggggggg! However we were surprised to find that it was very comfy and warm and we had an amazing nights sleep (it may have just been that we were exhausted though!).



The next morning we boarded another boat and sailed for 3 hours further into the lake (yes 3 hours, the lake is bloody massive!) to the island of Tequili. There we were treated to a demonstration of local dancing and informed of local customs. Men on the island always wear hats. If the hat is white they are not married and if it´s red and white then they are. Not very interesting but the hats are made by the men themselves. Walking around the island you see men going about their normal daily duties but knitting ferociously as they go. If they get married they also get to make a scarf out of their wife's hair, NICE!! It brings a whole new meaning to my wife is a pain in the neck! Apart from the strange local customs the island was beautiful and the views were amazing.