Meet the family

Sunday May 4th

Today we were gpoing for a cruise on Lake Titicaca. The first part was a fun tuk-tuk race as they took us from our hotel down to the port. My one came last and no its not because of my weight - due to these big Aussies and Kiwis I'm not even in the top half of weights on the tour.

After that we were onto our boat, which was not really that big, but just about fir the 17 of us. The tour guide gave us a bit of a breifing and fancied himself as a comedian. Our first port of call were the reed islands near the shore. These are home to a few thousand people who live on these floating islands (they have to float as the lake level can rise and fall). It was a strange sensation to walk on the reed surface of the island, although they were 5 metres thick, you really did feel you might fall through at any moment.

The islanders treated us to a show about their life. Although it was heavily scripted, and aimed at sealling some hand made produce, it was still quite entertaining. They showed how they eat the reeds, and I got to taste some. It didn't really taste of too much though. Then they took us sailing on a boat made of reeds. These boats only last 3 months, but we are early in the 3 month tourist season so it was in quite good nick. The islanders lined up to sing us the traditional departure song, and then they sang row, row, row your boat, which was quite funny.

After that we were off to Amantani island where we were going to stay the night. It was a thre hour boat journey so pretty much all we had to do was sunbathe. We were going to be staying with some local families, two or three to each family. When we got there we were assigned to our families, and myself and Jono, my roommate, got Eustequea as our 'mama'. We then had to walk up to our house, and it was a reasonably tough walk up quite a steep hill.

We got our lunch at our new home, where we met Lise, the cute 4 year old daughter of our mama. We never met the papa though, I heard him, but I think he wasn't having anything to do with the program. Anyway we had bought presents for our mama, various bits of food, basically more than we were going to eat anyway, so we gave them to her, and in case there were kids, we had a few presents for Lise. We had no sweets though, there is suppose to be a problem with the kids teeth here, but Lise was brushing her teeth.

Anyway after that we headed to the village centre where we were to play a 6 a side match with the locals. At 4000 metres. It was tough going, and for the first time I felt the altitude, even though I probably only played about 10 minutes out of 20. The locals were winning 1-0 at that point, but I had to head because we were to go up to the top of the mountain at the centre of the island for sunset. And it was a spectacular sunset.

Still I think I can now say I have played football at a higher level than most.

After dinner, again from our mama, it was off to a dance. The locals dressed us all in local costumes and made us do the local dances. It was fun, but again quite tiring at that altitude. And I did have to dance a lot as Jono had done his ankle at football and was unable to come down to the dance, so I ended up dancing twice as much with Eustaquea. But it was a good night.