5th September - Puno

The lack of hot water caused some disgruntlement within the group during the morning. Breakfast was a slightly tense affair and, given that I don't indulge in this meal, I decided to go for a wander up to the plaza to see the cathedral. Having seen it, I noticed a statue up on a hill and decided that the view from up there would be quite good. I headed up the nearest hill and, spotting a little pathway off to the right, followed it uphill and, eventually, up to the statue. The views were indeed as good as expected and so, following a couple of photos, I headed back down to the café. The effects of high altitude were also beginning to kick in. Lyndsey in particular was dying off and hankered after her bed.

We decided that as we were running quite short of money that we would start cashing travelers cheques. This was a long, slow and painful process. The first 2 sets we cashed at one bank, but, due to the fact that James's cheques were Thomas Cook cheques, we had to go to a different bank with them. The second bank accepted the cheques but took forever with them. We had to sign and date the front of every single cheque and write his passport number on the back of each one. Once we had written the number on the back of each one, the cashier then decided that we should sign the back of each one as well. Having done all this, he then decided to print James's full name and the word 'English' on the back of every one. I suspect there were somewhere in the region of 20 or more cheques to do this for...

Eventually, long after the bank had closed for lunch, we managed to escape with the money minus a rather large commission (luckily they hadn't overhead James's conversation about forgery that he had started while waiting at the counter!). We returned to the Hostel and took stock. Lyndsey had decided that she was feeling sufficiently crud that she would have a quick blast on the Internet and then return to bed. We decided that we would all head for the train station and book the onward leg of our journey, depositing Lyndsey at the first Internet café, after which I would go and book myself a tour to Sillustani ceremonial burial site.

We found an Internet café for Lyndsey, but the train station wasn't open (or, to be more precise, I navigated us in the wrong direction and we missed the station and then assumed it was closed), so I left the other 4 to wander around Puno while I went to the tourist office and booked my tour. I headed down to the bus pick-up point and met with a few of the other members of my group. They were a hippy-esque gang who were doing a meditation course in the sacred valley and originated from London, Germany and Canada. They were all very sweet, if a little unusual.

The bus came along and we piled in. We stopped again outside the train station and were joined in the back row by Taco from Japan, and a guy from the Netherlands. We headed into the congestion of the city. In the distance I head a cry of "My hat blew right off!" Sure enough, over on the far side of the bus were Zoe and James sitting in a pedalo. I tried to shout to Zoe but ended up irritating everyone on the bus instead. So I banged on the back window as we passed them and caught Chris and Jamal's attention in their pedalo. They gave chase through the streets before we headed up into the hills behind Puno to the alto-plano (or something like that).

It took about an hour to drive to Sillustani and our guide, Elisia, then took over and showed us the various sites of interest. "Why do people come here?" he asked, and then answered his own question, "Because the Lonely Planet says it is a good day out and it only starts at 2:30pm so you don't even have to get out of bed early!". True.

The site was beautiful. A small peninsula into a lake rising into a small hill, upon which different types of funeral towers had been constructed. On the way up the hill, Elisia showed us a rock with a puma's head and a spiral carved into the side. He asked if anyone had a compass with them and, as it happened, I had mine in my coat pocket and handed it over. Elisia showed us that, as he moved the compass down beside the rock, the needle spun through 360'. Quite impressive.

Later, Elisia was talking about the site next to an obvious tourist trap of a lady, child and lama. While he was talking, the lady took a notion to wrap the lama rope around the child's neck. Sadly, the lama then decided to wander off, the rope became taught and the child was left hanging in mid air by the lama rope. I know it was wrong, but I'm afraid I had to laugh...

After seeing a few of the towers, we began to head back to Puno. Elisia offered to take us to both the museum and a little farm nearby and we agreed that this sounded like fun. The guide book wasn't joking when it said the museum was 'small'. I suspect there were less than 10 display cases, although one did include the remains of a couple of mummys (including the lama dung which they had replaced the stomach with... never did quite work that one out). Anyhow, we continued on the bus to the farmyard. It was extremely impressive. We considered our Hostel to be a tad on the cold side, but how people could sleep in draughty, stone walled, thatched shacks, with no electricity or running water, is beyond me. None-the-less, the people in the house had prepared some food for us and I tucked into some freshly boiled potato. Yum!

On return to Puno, I beat a hasty path back to the Hostel (the side trips had taken some extra time) and found the others sitting, waiting for the hot water which was due at any second. Sure enough, just after 7pm, the hot water system sprung into action and hot(ish) showers were enjoyed by all.

Suitably refreshed, we headed out for dinner in Puno. We found a very pleasant restaurant in the centre of town with a big pizza oven spewing heat into the restaurant. Sadly, this heat did not extend to the rice or vegetables, but even so, I was hungry enough that I also ordered pudding! During dinner we had a fantastic discussion about what I had seen during the trip to Sillustani. Zoe, not realizing that the spiral was carved into the stone and not a piece of copper wire, declared that the spiral had caused the weird effects seen on the compass. After being derided for several minutes over this, we then discovered that the reason Lyndsey kept asking questions about how the compass had been held was because she couldn't see how the guide had been balancing the compasses. Classic. Another super twist in the conversation came when Zoe explained that there were always loads of Americans in Ironbridge and Lyndsey asked what they were visiting. The joy of traveling with blonds is that they not only look good, but provide endless hours of amusement! After dinner, we headed back to our Hostel for some well deserved rest. I popped out for an hour to catch up on my e-mails and then joined the rest of the crew in going to bed.