I woke up FREEZING! My nose was ice cold! And getting changed was actually the most terrible experience, I had to take off my nice warm clothes and expose my skin to the icy air before putting on equally cold clothes that just sucked any warmth I had managed to keep in me, out. I was an actual icicle by the end. It was about 20 degrees farehinet inside since there was no internal heating, and colder outside. I put on two pairs of pants and leg warmers, and then on top I put on four layers, two being incredible warm alpaca jerseys, then big socks, hat, gloves, and scarf, but I was none to warm! I also felt like a giant pillow!
After we finally finished getting dressed we headed of for our lake Titikaca tour.
Lake Titikaca: at 12,507 feet above sea level lake Titikaca is the highest navigable lake in the world, and also the largest lake in South America. In fact parts of the lake is actually in Bolivia. Nestled in amongest the Andes, many of the mountain range's peaks have become barren, grassy islands in the middle of the lake. Grassy as most trees can't grow this high.
It's easy to forget it's not the ocean when it goes on past the horizon.
Those snow capped mountains are actually in Bolivia!
A picture I found on the Internet of the mountains!
Then the two day one night tour of lake Titikaca began with a long boat ride
Me freezing on a boat :)
Our first stop was a floating island, made from nothing other than grass roots and straw!
How crazy would it be to live on one of these things!
Sometimes if you stood in one place for to long it would sink and fill with lake water and you the locals had to come over and covered it up with a pile of new straw! How do they sleep?
Little replicas of their houses, they have to cook on a stone so that their whole island doesn't burn down!
It was super fun playing volleyball with this local boy, but one time the ball rolled down into an area of the island that had sunk and filled with lake water, and when Hunter went to get it she got soaked! I laughed a little but then karma came when I too got wet going after the ball!
I felt a little weird though, these people were living like this because foreign tourists wanted to come see them, I felt bad, like I was responsible for their tiny houses and isolated location, is this how they really want to live? And they were just begging me to buy their goods...
However they could also be very happy people getting to preserve their ancestor's way of life, language and religion. They believed the lake was sacred and would always offer it some of their drink and food before eating it themselves! Their location was also stunning, and they could probably make good money from their goods so I can't really speak to their happiness.
Our next stop was an actual island called Amantani where we would stay the night
A map of the lake, our journey had thus far taken us from Puni to Amantani.
Amantani: Rural, freezing cold, and very steep
My host grandmother Juana, I also stayed with her husband Jorge and their grandson Oliver. She took us up this incredibly steep hill to her house, and the cobblestone roads were beautiful. I was struggling and out of breath the entire way up, she lived on one of the highest outskirts of the tiny town, but she was just walking ahead, knitting as she went!
Our host house was also extremely rustic and beautiful.
The entrance
The courtyard where all the rooms meet.
The view from our room
Me on the balcony
One of the few light bulbs in the house, there was barely electricity (no outlets) and the only source of running water was a hose outside the house! Luckily I had brought a battery to charge my iPhone from as it had run out of battery by the end of the day because I took so many photos!
We ate lunch in their tiny kitchen where their stove was a camping stove on the ground. There were tons of flies buzzing around too but Jorge could kill them with a rubber band! How cool is that!
The kitchen and dinning room
The meal was so huge! Delicious but huge! We had homemade quinoa soup for the first course, and when I say homemade I think Jorge grew the quinoa himself! And then we had three giant potatoes each, lettuce and cucumbers, and an omelet sized piece of squeaky cheese. When you ate it it squeaked against your teeth so loudly you could hear it in other people's mouths! And the texture was so unsettling, like rubber! I had such a hard time finishing it all but I didn't want to be rude and leave food they prepared so carefully for me! Especially when it was pretty obvious they didn't have much. With the three giant potatoes left I was already stuffed full, by the time I finished the last one I was not sure if I could move, or if I was going to throw up. It was worse than last Thanksgiving!In the afternoon we went for a hike up pachapapa the mountain in the center of the island which was just beautiful! It was also incredibly hard hiking uphill at 13,000 feet, as their is just no air! We were panting and panting and had to stop a few times. There were two mountains, papacha and mamacha, the mother and father of the island.
These street vendors are everywhere! Even at the top of this mountain! Trying to sell tourists hats, scarfs, knick knacks, brackets, and anything else you could want! Even our host family had tried to sell us some of their goods which was actually very rude, and a pretty awkward situation for everyone involved.
Hunter, me, and then German Caroline at the top of the mountain at sunset!
Me, appreciating this adventure to lake Titikaca at sunset.
After sunset it got very, very cold I was already wearing three or four layers in that picture but I was freezing on the way down and my fingers were numb by the end of it. Those street vendors selling warm alpaca clothes on the way down were on to something!
Dinner was another fricking massive meal, and I was still stuffed from lunch! It was miserable at the end trying to finish all those potatoes while simultaneously trying to smile and look like I'm enjoying it for the host family.
Then after dinner they had a surprise for us, traditional clothing that we could wear to go to a traditional dance down in the town. So me and Hunter got dressed up, while Caroline decided it was too much of a tacky tourist thing for her.
Hunter, our host grandson Oliver, and me at the 'local' dance. Which turned out to be as Caroline had thought, the most tacky tourist thing ever. About fifty or so tourists pretending to be Peruvian natives while trying to dance to the traditional dances, but actually just looking like they were having a seizure. By about the third dance we had all given up actually trying to do the dances and just formed a giant Congo line. The reason Oliver doesn't look so happy in that picture is because he had to sit through all of it waiting for us. Poor guy! Although tacky the giant Congo lines were actually a lot of fun!
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