Putting the Adventure in Adventure Travel

As you can see from the picture, we did make the first stop on our Lake Titikaka tour, although it was planes, taxis, and boats to make it happen. We are in Puno now and on our way to Cusco in the am. We are behind on filling you in on Lima, and a lot has happened in the last couple of days, so the plan for this post is to tell the story of our journey to meet up with our Titikaka tour group and cover a bunch of ground with photos. Further elaboration to follow when we have more time. Internet access is easy to find, the time is not. Keep reading after the fold...


Things got started early Tuesday with our old buddy Eduardo the taxi driver. You may remember him from this photo (he is wearing the same shirt). He picked us up at 3:30am for the ride to Lima airport. At this hour traffic in Lima is actually sane and we made it with no problems. We were scheduled to connect thorough Cusco to Juliaca to start our tour of Lake Titikaka. We had known all along that we were scheduled to arive in Juliaca at 9am, which was an hour after our tour group's boat had departed the port of Puno for the Islands. So we had made arrangements ahead of time to join the group after the first leg of the tour. The first stop for the tour is the floating islands of the Uros tribe, which is relatively close to shore. After that they head to the island Amantani. Along the way they agreed to make a small detour to pick us up at the end of the penninsula, which was an excellent plan in theory.

We arrived in Cusco with no problems. Then our flight was delayed a half hour. Then longer. Then the flight one gate over was cancelled for "weather reasons". Apparently flights are cancelled with partly sunny skies in Peru. We called our tour operator and he said we could still figure out a way to make the connection. By the time we landed in Juliaca it was 11:30 and things looked grim. Our friend David from the tour operator gave us the option of driving out to the end of the penninsula and arranging for a private boat to take us to Amantani. (by the way this is a good point to mention that the key to this whole tour was getting to spend the night on Amantani housed by an indigenous family in their home, so needless to say we were looking forward to it.) We decide to roll the dice.

So with David in the passenger seat and our trusty driver Señor Puma (I love the fact that there is a key for ñ here) we were on our way down the road you see to the left. It was like that for an hour and a half and we received a good introduction to rural Peruvian life. By the way , we never actuall got Señor Puma's full name but it ended in puma.



Afer a teeth chattering ride down the penninsula we made it to a small dock. Here are David(R) and Señor Puma(L) as we get underway. This was just after what we learned what the captain (Simon) was going to charge us for this journey. And of course we had excellent instructions about what to do if we did not meet up with Angel (our tour group leader). Sorry about Señor Puma; trust me he drives like a puma even if he doesn't look like one. And if you are wondering about the annoying practice of telling you every random person's name along the trip, we are not tired of it yet.

We needed about an hour to find Angel once we got to the island. Simon put the screws to us to get paid, and we gave in, but to his credit he stuck it through until we found Angel and had a family to host us. See below for some pictures on the island.

The trip back to Puno was improvised as well. After actaully sticking with our group for a tour of the neighboring island of Taquile, we were dropped off on one of the floating islands so we could see the part of the tour that we missed. This was no problem, but we got dropped off at around 3:15 and were supposedly getting picked up by a boat Mr. Willy (the tour company operator) had scheduled to arrive at 5pm. The only problem was an island made of reeds about 50 yards in diamater doesn't take a lot of time to explore, even considering there were several tables of local crafts for Deb to peruse. Anyway to start getting through this quicker a random boat picked our island and their captain (Eduardo. Nope still not getting old) agreed to take us in for free. Then our real guy showed up and we jumped on there and made it into Puno. To be met by... David our buddy from the taxi ride. We negotiated the final balance payment as that was that. Believe me this could have been a much longer story. Anyway here are some highlights in pictures...

Our host family's home...






Is that a scarecrow or Debbie?







Our guestroom...














The cookhouse with our host mother. Everything was cooked here over an open flame. And it all tasted great. It was also a great place to stay warm and talk with the family. You can't really tell but the homes are made of clay and straw bricks, sometimes with a layer(s) of painted plaster on them.














Here are the two daughters, Dahlia (older) and Dolly (very cute). We're still not sure we have there names exactly right, but they answered when we used them.














Deb and Jack with youngest son Frank in full traditional dress about to head out to a fiesta for the touristas.