Lake Titicaca

Peru! Wow... where to start? After an amazing 4 days in Cusco and a day in Machu Pichu, Susannah and I took a bus to Puno, the main port town of Lake Titicaca, seperating Peru from Bolivia. We arrived at 5 am and somehow I was able to talk in Spanish and get us on a guided tour by 8 am.... yes, exactly, a guided tour--- how boring! But nooooo this was not the usual guided tour......

We started off by taking a boat with 20 other people (mostly English speaking French and Germans) to Uros, a floating island... meaning that the people living on the island take reeds from the water and attach them to make the ground of the island and also build their houses and everything with the reeds (picture above). I went on a short boat ride made out of these reeds while these two little girls climbed all over me and braided my hair. It was amazing to see house after house and schools made out of reeds and these people that live there year round, making a living by selling home-made hats to tourists.

After this we went to Amantani, another island, and stayed with a family that had no electricity and a scary outhouse and they live like traditional indeginous people and the mom dressed us up in traditional garb and took us to a party in the school house with traditional Peruvian music and she cooked for us in this little kitchen that was seperate from the house made of like clay and a thatched roof and their first language is Quecua, the language of the Incas, and they just know enough spanish for the tourists who come, and no tourists had been to this island before 10 yrs ago... I was woken up at 7am with a knock on the door and the mother walking in with a bucket of warm water for me to wash my face, there are no roads or cars (which was wonderful since everywhere you go is either straight uphill or straight downhill!)... but it was all wonderful to experience and it really was the highest example I have ever seen of true simple living... the happiness coming from our family was amazing. We would be talking in English and start laughing and she would laugh too, as if she understood. It was like a dream, smilely children skipping around in traditional indeginous clothing and the lake on all sides. It felt like a dream. And it was amzaing to compare the different lifestyles... to me, living on an island like this would be difficult for a number of reasons, but to them living in busy America and working in an office, driving, etc., would be horrible. Experiencing this was humbling more than anything, and definetely made me appreciate everything we have back home...