Back to 'dry' land

Monday May 5th

Today we were actually up quite early as we were off on an early boat journey to another island. So in total we didn't really spend that much time with our new famnilies on Amantani island. But off we were to Taquile island (not Tequila island as we were hoping).

Tequile is a similar island to Amantani, but I guess it seems a slight bit richer, and yet it is probably even more traditional. We got a guided tour of the island, which involved walking up one side, it was quite steep but not really a problem, to the main square which was near the top of the hill. We wandered around there for a while before we were taken to a local restaurant for lunch, which was a traditional trout dish, with trout from the lake. It was very good, and made up for the fact that we hadn't gotten the trout I was expecting from our host families the night before.

After that it was down the even steeper other side of the island to where our boat now awaited us, before we headed back to Puno on the mainland. The journey itself was quite long, and hot, but we were still back in time for a quick explore of Puno in the daylight, we had only seen it at night before. Its not the greatest city in the world, but the one small tourist area is a lot more relaxed and secure than we had been lead to believe, and it definitely seemed a lot more western than Bolivia had been.

Speaking of Bolivia, we were intrigued to notice that the vote for Santa Cruz state to separate from Bolivia was passed, and Bolivia was now getting some travel warnings from some governments. It looks like we got out of there in time. We actually had been given some notice of this by our guides in Bolivia, but it is still interesting to think that we may have visited a country that may not exist in the future. OK it will, but Yugoslavia comes to mind.

As Puno is so touristy, there is a bit of competition for western tourists amongst the bars. The benefit fo this is that we get free drinks. So we went back to the bar we had gotten free drinks from the previous time we were in Puno and got some more. We ended up with quite a long nights dancing, making it three nights dancing in a row. At leat this time we knew the songs, and even had a bit of control over what was played (Fame and Flashdance were requested because of Sara's legwarmers).