Lake Titicaca

Just spent a couple of nights in Puno on route to Boliva and did a day tour to some of the islands on Lake Titicaca . Was a fairly lazy tour, lots of time on the boat, not much walking but plently to see.

Our first stop was to visit some of the floating islands of Uros. 

Here the people are Aymara and live on islands entirely constructed of reed roots and reeds. Like this model 

 They are a tight community and only marry between the islands.  They gave us a very friendly welcome, teaching us all about how they build the islands, showed us one of their homes and even sang us a goodbye song, in Aymara, Spanish and finally in English 'my bonnie lives over the ocean'.  We also took a short boat ride one of their traditional rowing boats/catamaran. These have the heads of Pumas at the front.

We then headed onto the larger land based island of Isla Taquile, a Quecha island. Here we walked up to the main square at about 4,000m and took in the views. Some local boys also joined in our photo, for a sole each. They were later seen heading to the local sweet shop....

We had lunch at traditional restaurant, some quick lessons in local costume, e.g. the colour of the men's hats dictates whether they are married or not, before walking back to or boat and a bit of a bumpy ride back to Puno as the rain came in....