Wherever You Go, Go With All Your Heart: Puno, Peru

Day 7

Today we are driving for 9 hours from Cuzco to Puno. We passed many small villages where we were able to see what the very rural villages looked like. We saw dead sheep on top of a van, a bunch of people peeing out in the open and lots of animals. Along the way we stopped at Ruqui to check out some ruins of an old Incan Village.

We stopped at a river that was maybe 4 feet wide (more like a creek), but apparently this was part of the Amazon. So we were able to jump over the Amazon River which was pretty cool. We stopped at the highest town in Peru which was 14,000 feet and it was gorgeous.

Puno was something else. There was a festival called Lady of the Candlelight Mass going on. Everyone from Puno and surrounding towns flocked to the main square (which was right next to our hotel). There were thousands of people in the streets dancing and drinking the night away celebrating this Saint or Lady. They have Saints for everything out here and they worship them all!

Ruins at Ruqui

The "Amazon River" we jumped over

Lady of the Candlelight Mass Festival in the Town Square of Puno

Lady of the Candlelight Mass Festival

14,000 feet above sea level

Day 8

Lake Titicaca

Can you say ALTITUDE SICKNESS. Suzy and I along with a few others in the group finally started to realize this was hitting us. We thought we got past it after the airport in Cuzco, but little did we know it had just begun. It started when we got to Cuzco and got really really bad at night. We looked up the symptoms and we had all of them...I am talking about a headache, fever, and major stomach issues and we were well above 8,000 feet sea level (we were at 12,500 ft in Puno). Suzy and I took Advil PM every single night since we arrived in Cusco. I am so glad I brought a bottle of that stuff since I was very close to not buying it back home. Every morning we felt fine after waking up minus not being able to walk around without panting for oxygen. It was so bad last night we almost asked our guide for Oxygen. It was a very weird thing and we literally felt hungover every night and we weren't even drinking (okay maybe only a beer).

Today we took a boat out on Lake Titicaca, the worlds highest navigable lake. Go ahead and laugh all you want, but the name of the lake is not joke. It was pretty gloomy and actually started to rain a lot once we got out there. On the other side of the lake was Bolivia, but we didn't get that far. We did make it to the "floating islands". There are hundreds of families living out on these floating islands made of only reeds. We got the chance to go onto one and meet a few of the families. They showed us their homes and their art work and of course tried to sell us everything they had. I think there were about 90 islands and they had schools, churches and stores out on them too... There's an entire community out there! They had 2 of their own languages that were completely different than Spanish, but most of them could also speak Spanish. They take a boat to Puno which was maybe 10 miles away from the islands whenever they need to buy or trade goods. It was so different and I had no idea these were here.