Past few nights have been rather solid for bizzare meetings, oh, and today I was on a floating island. Four different floating islands actually.
After my last post I met some Cali kids from Los Angeles back at my hostel. I bullshitted with them for a while and we agreed to go out and get some dinner later that night. We ended up going back to Colors for dinner on my recommendation. I ordered an Andean cheese fondue for the whole table. It was awesome, ´nuff said.
Afterwards we headed to a place called the Rock Pub. Very cool laid back bar. That´s us in the first pic. Daniel is on the left and Jason is in the center. It was already shaping up to be a good night when we met this guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Vroemen
Yes, we met a former Olympian from the Netherlands while we were chilling in a bar in Peru. He was there with his fiance whom he had proposed to while they were traveling. We ended up talking to the couple for almost 2 hours. Very cool guy and his wife to be is kinda smokin. He mentioned he had gone jogging on the beach in Copacabana that morning. Jogging!? Copacabana!? That´s at like 13k ft! Athletes are amazing.
After Simon and his fiance departed Jason and Daniel broke out the Jenga blocks they had at the bar while I snapped photos of them building ridiculous towers. We ended up at one other bar that had a bathroom lit by blacklight only for our last drink. We wanted to go dancing but couldn´t really find a satisfactory place. That´s fine, I think I may be able to find a place to shake my ass in Cusco.
Yesterday, I shopped til I dropped for most of the day as well as visit a museum with some very cool and creepy mummies. The crafts here are wonderful and cheap too. I can´t mention everything I bought because that would be telling, but I did pick up two cozy alpaca sweaters for myself to keep warm in the high elevation nights. I also walked through the main outdoor market street here in Puno. I suspect walks like that will never get old.
I had an early dinner with a Swiss woman. She was 38, a computer programmer, and rather beautiful. She was on sabatical from work for, get this, 6 months to travel. She had already been in Peru for 2 months and was headed to Bolivia next. She was also traveling alone which makes her ballsy and slightly reckless...I think I´m in love. She took the picture of me in one of my new sweaters and with my cuy dinner. Yes cuy, I had guinea pig again and it was delicious.
To cap last night I headed over to another restaurant for dessert and a live music and dance show, traditional Ande´s style, pan pipes and all. My dessert was amazing of course; white chocolate cheesecake with flavoring from a local berry whose name escapes me, but the real highlight was the show. One of the pics gives you an example of the costumes that the dancers wore.
I ended up chatting with a Lithuanian couple, Laura and Raymond, after the show was finished. I discovered that Laura´s father was friends with Žydrūnas Ilgauskas´s father and that she knew him when he was a child. Yeah, ´Z´from the Cavs. The world just keeps getting smaller. We talked snow skiing the rest of the time and they recommended northern Italy for a skiing destination if I can someday make it out there.
After the show I wondered around town to check out the Saturday night scene before I headed back to my hostel. I got up early this morning to take a boat out on Lake Titicaca.
I ended up getting on the wrong boat. I paid for a day trip out to the closest floating islands...I should probably explain this whole floating island thing.
So there is a tribe of people that live on Lake Titicaca called the Uros and their island is named the same. They moved out there hundreds of years ago to keep away from other more aggressive tribes in the area. They make their floating islands out of reeds that grow in the Lake. They also make about eleventy billion other things out of those reeds, as well as eat them. So yeah, now you know...
Anyway, I got on a boat that was stopping at Uros, but then heading out three hours to another Island called Taquile and spending the night with families there. I was only going to Uros and then back to Puno. The tour operator handled everything though. I stayed at the small island the boat dropped me at and our guide told me another boat would be along to pick me up. He then shook my hand and said, ¨Good luck!¨ Despite that, I did get another boat back to Puno just fine. Some details of the day; Uros is actually broken up into a bunch of small islands, so my tour group got to hitch a ride on a boat made of reeds from one island to another. Some island girls came along and sang to us for tips. The men demonstrated exactly how they used the roots of the reeds to build the island and then made a walking surface with the stems. A small island usually lasts about 30 years before it is too rotten to be used. All in all a very cool experience and I´m glad I went.
I wanted to buy a bus ticket for tomorrow morn for Cusco but the bus line I want to take didn´t have any seats left. I reserved a seat for Tuesday morn and I think I will use tomorrow to go further out on the Lake. It will only cost me nine dollars to get a round trip ferry out to Taquile island and I can´t think of a reason not to go.
With that, I´m off to find a tasty Pisco sour. Adios!
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