Our hotel is three blocks from the main square, Plaza de Armas, and cathedral.
We orient ourselves to the main square first thing so we know how to get back to our hotel and then start exploring from the there.
After the morning of exploring, we took a motor taxi to the waterfront on Lake Titicaca where we found a boat to take us to the floating islands, which is what we came to see.
We head for the floating islands of the Uros People who built these islands to protect themselves from the more aggressive Amarya and Inca Peoples. These islands are made of the reeds that you can see beside the boat. They build up layers and layers do reeds. As the islands rot from below, more reeds are laid down on top. There are around 85 of these islands in the lake with each island holding 1 to 10 extended families. Only about 10 of the islands allow tourists to visit.
The reeds are also eatable, used for medicinal purposes, for their houses, and for boat building.
This is their hospital with solar power for electricity. It is not floating.
We landed on one island where heard how the islands were made, maintained, and how the people live on them. The islands are actually anchored so they won't drift out farther into the lake. There is an elementary school on one of the larger islands, but when the children go to high school, they go into Puno and don't return. We heard all of this in Spanish so we missed a great deal of the explanations. This is the island we went on.
This is what we were walking on.
We rode in a balsa boat over to an island to get some lunch. We had the best trout that I have ever had, eyeballs, tail and all. The food here in Peru is good, although plain, but here we had the best hot sauce ever. The cook said his dream is to come to the USA to be a chef and also sell his hot sauce, which is his own recipe.
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