Moving on... July 17, 2010

Moving on....
After the glorious day spent at Machu Picchu I met up with my pal Ryan for a quick meal before biding her adieu. Then I returned to my hostel in hopes of getting some rest before my train would whisk me away at 5 AM. Unfortunately for me, there was the nearly obligatory yet seemingly impromptu massive fiesta complete with live band who decided to perform directly outside my bedroom window, non-stop from the hours of 9 PM until 3:30 AM. Fantastic... I was thrilled... Obviously, I had an amazing night´s sleep and was ecstatic to have to go back to Urubamba and pack up all my belongings, say goodbye to those I had grown to love in the Sacred Valley and hop on another fun filled and thoroughly relaxing bus several hours to the frigged city of Puno from there it would only be a 30 minute combi ride to the town where I was to meet up with Lauren and Dave. As luck would have it, the bus took much longer than expected and I arrived significantly later than anticipated so I was stuck searching for a vacant room in a hostel in the city of Puno (probably the coldest place on the planet and equally as friendly). I managed to locate a room with a concrete floor and one large glass window that did nothing to keep the little existing heat inside the room, at that point I would have really considered taking solace amongst the bits of cardboard in the street if it meant that I could go to sleep!
The next morning I jumped in a combi and headed the 30 minutes from the city of Puno to Chucuito where I met up with Lauren and Dave and their two friends from USC.
We spent what seemed like hours waiting for a truly sub par breakfast... ohh Peru... when will you learn the meaning of urgency? We nearly went down to the kitchen to help them prepare the meal... really, what does it take to scramble some eggs??? The one useful bit of knowledge that I took with me from this meal is to always order your hot chocolate with milk because if you do not then they will just mix it with water... yum...
That was enough of Puno for us so we headed down to Lake Titicaca to grab a boat to the Uros islands. These are the floating islands upon which the locals have created immense, amazing works of art from bundles of reeds! Even the islands themselves are incredible crafts as they have been fabricated by the hands of those who now call them home. All in all they are pretty cool as they are fully man-made from the reeds but there are rumors that the "local" Aymara people no longer actually live on them as they would like
tourists to believe... Also, there is also quite a bit if uncomfortable pressure to purchase the handicrafts sold on the islands, as if it is the tourist's responsibility to support the islanders' choice to live segregated from those dwelling on the mainland. Then they get you on this really cool reed boat that is shaped like a dragon and just before they push off they tell you that this too will cost you... Surprise, surprise... As with everything in Peru, this took much longer than anticipated but when stranded on an island all one can do is wait...
We ate dinner at fancy pizza joint, the lights went out and none of the locals seemed even bothered by it... ahahha Peru! We had so much food then back to our hotel for some silly fun drinking a bit of the Columbian rum Dave had been packing around for the past three months and playing cards then it was off to bed for we had an early morning scheduled for tomorrow as our bus was to depart at 8 AM for Arequipa.