We took a boat from Puno to see the Uros, also known as the "floating islands". The Uros are artificial islands made out of reed located on the Peruvian side of lake Titikaka.Their inhabitants rely on fishing and bird hunting and as we soon discovered...tourism...
If one can disregard the "shmaltzi" overdone act for the tourists, the idea that people actually live like this (in huts, on water in the middle of nowhere) is pretty overwhelming. We thought it could be a creative solution to the middle east problem... at least you don't have to pay "arnona"... though the islands themselves have to be maintained on a weekly bases to prevent them from sinking...
From Puno we took a bus ride to Cuzco. We got scammed by the tour agent who took a lot of money, but put us on a really cheep bus with the local villagers. The ride itself was a nightmare(or as Loni would put it a "HAVAYA"). It was an 8 hours ride without a toilet in a bus that smelled of people, who haven't showered for at least a couple of weeks. It was like a driving market - on each stop (and there were a lot of those) a noisy bunch of saleswomen climbed up and started pushing us everything from ponchos to hot cheese... at one point a christian missionary talked for a tedious hour about Jesus saving him from his drug addiction and stopping him from killing his father (he was BTW selling holly stones, because after Jesus touched him his eyesight became really bad after crying a lot... I would personally recommend some eye drops & a visit to the optometrist, instead of hanging out on fumy buses all day).
Cuzco is a really beautiful city, with stony narrow alleys and a great atmosphere... It reminded us of Prague...
Although, they have a really hard marketing tendency. They jump on you in the middle of the street and refuse to acknowledge the fact that you might not be interested in their amazing products (I mean, who wouldn't wanna buy a brassiere made out of lama wool or be given an aromatic massage in the middle of a street by a smelly old man). Alon got really good in fighting them off with time... The problem is that due to his automatic response "no gracias!!!", to everyone who talks to him on the street, we had some awkward moments with friendly tourists that just wanted us to take their picture or asked for directions.
Unfortunately we got here at a really bad time... in the middle of a workers strike.
The demonstrators blocked the railway and the roads preventing people from going to the city of Machu Picchu...they even stoped the train to Machu Picchu and made all the tourist come down in the middle of nowhere...
We had to take a bus leaving from Cuzco at 3:00 am(before the demonstrators get up), take a 2.5 hour detour to another town, sleep in the bus until the train stops there at 8:53 am, and then ride the train for another hour and a half... but it was totally worth it...
The city is huge and marvelous...and the mountains around it are really beautiful as well...
The meaning of the name comes from the name of the mountain from which the city discoverers first observed on it. It means "machu- old, picchu- mountain". However, like most tourist, we too didn't quite know how to pronounce the name and gave the locals a few laughs... apparently if you say you want a tour to machu PICHU instead of saying machu PICCHU, you are really asking for a tour in the "old penis".
Today we are taking a bus to Nazca and then home sweet home....
BTW: Loni wants me to remind to whom it may concern, that he wants "shnitzelim" and "avocado & egg salad" when we come home...
see you soon...
Dina & Loni
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