Big Floaters
Trip Start
Sep 06, 2006
1
18
36
Trip End
Sep 01, 2007
Puno,
Peru
Thursday, November 23, 2006
We left Boliva on a bus which wasn´t too bad, crossed the border by foot with ease and popped back on the bus which took us on to Puno where we thought we would stop for a little trip out to the Floating Islands and the people who are marooned, i mean live on them.
After a relaxing time in Copacabana and an an easy transfer by bus and I think our guard must have dropped a little. The bus company seemed good and the conductor type fella told us his company could organise for us to get to the Floating islands easily and then continue our journey with them up to Cusco via aonther bus company but that he would sort our tickets out. Being trusting type of folk and thinking it all sounded like a good idea i said, "Si Senore!" (see my spanish is improving all the time!)
We got off the bus at Puno and our positve mood changed
1 Strawy high
. To cut a very long and tedious story short, the conductor type person tried to completely rip us off by firstly snatching the money out of our hand, forcing us to leave our rucksacks in a fake storage lockup and then selling us fake tickets onto Cusco. We cottoned onto his little game thanks to the little old lady sitting on the door of the terminal toilets who told me ´Yeah amigo, no good ticket, bad ticket, yeah amigo, no ticket, bad ticket...´ Thankyou little old lady. When we asked him what was going on the guy totally blew up, shouting abuse at us and cursing all tourists, at which point we gave him two fingers, of the chocolate twix variety of course to keep the peace. Thankfully this was his favourite chocolate bar, we all became friends, got our real tickets to Cusco and the rest is history. The Floating Islands are an interesting place. People live on islands made of reeds and have lived there in the same way with the same traditions for centuries. We got on a boat that looked like it might sink at any moment all packed with Peruvian school kids. They were on an educational trip, although when their parents get the films developed they will be very pleased to see only pictures of Nick and Cath - they were much more interested in us than any of the floating islands. The island inhabitants make virtually all their money through tourism. On each little island you visit, the people come out of their little huts and uncover their crafts for example a stuffed bird attached to a small reed boat and if you try and take a photo they ask for money
CathAid-06
. Not a bad idea really, we should have done the same when all the kids were photographing us. We bought a small pot but it broke at a later date when our rucksack was rammed onto a bus which is sad because i had hoped to use it to put olives or perhaps peanuts in it on my return home when entertaining. We took some sweets for the kids who came running out of their school to greet us in all their intricately weaved and embroided clothes and ended up fighting over them, i think one little girl even got punched. It was an interesting place to visit and visually very pretty but it is becoming very over commercialized and is loosing its tranquil nature, however the people on the island are making more money so that must be good. Our boat ran out of petrol on the way back, about 200m from land and we all had to lean out on one side as the pump on the boat also didn´t work and we were taking on lots of water. We ended up getting towed by another boat but somehow I reckon the skipper just wanted to save on petrol.
