On Top Of The World

Checking out of our Hotel, the Rumi Punku at 10am, we had an hour to kill before needing to get to the airport so hung around the hotel lounge area.

The hotel in Cusco has been both good and bad. The layout and actual hotel itself has been really nice, with part of the building being built on the ruins of an Incan Temple.

The problems have been the nearby building works, and the heating which wouldn’t turn off, which have turned what should have been a relaxing stay into a bit of a battle at times. Still, any hotel which serves bacon butties in a morning can’t be all bad!

Our taxi through to Cuzco airport was an experience in itself. While most drivers in Cusco have a tendency to pay scant regard to any road regulations, this driver extended this to driving the wrong way down a one way dual carriageway! And when he realised his mistake (the beeping and flashing oncoming cars were a dead giveaway!), he veered onto the correct side of the dual carriageway and nearly slammed into the side of a bus! It was quite relieving to arrive at the airport in one piece!

An extremely bumpy and very short (30 minutes) flight later, we landed in Juliaca airport.

The city of Juliaca is 3,825 metres (12,549 feet) above sea level, and is the highest place on Earth we have been to.

If we had visited here straight from sea level, I think the altitude would have killed us. As it was, the week long acclimatisation in Cusco served us well, as we didn’t really experience any adverse effects here.

Picking our luggage off the carousel, to the accompaniment of a Peruvian pipe playing band, we boarded our transfer bus to Puno on Lake Titicaca. The bus was so packed, with no room for luggage storage, so we stood and watched as the driver and co-driver clambered on top of the van and started lifting everyone’s luggage onto the roof! Altitude or not, I’m sure if we’d have tried to lift that much luggage onto a van we’d have been too tired to drive afterwards!

From the airplane as we were landing, Juliaca looked like a really poor city. In fact, from the plane we struggled to see any streets that weren’t just made of dirt. The view from the van as we passed through the city wasn’t much better.

It’s easy to make the mistake in Peru of thinking a city is deprived by looking at the buildings, as often you’ll see whole areas which look like building sites. Strangely though, this isn’t an indication of the deprivation of an area, as the tax regulations in Peru mean that tax is paid only when a building is completed. So very often, houses are completely built and then a top floor is started and left unfinished. So, while being completely ugly to look at, its quite an ingenious tax dodge for the inhabitants!

While there was the fair share of this in Juliaca, the whole place just felt so gloomy and a hard to live in city, and seemed like the sort of place where you were glad you were just passing through. But, in a strangely voyeuristic way, it was compelling to look at as we drove through.

We finally got onto the toll road between Juliaca and Puno, which in itself was a misnomer as there seemed to be very little actual finished road to drive on! It was quite a fascinating forty five minute journey though, as we passed Peruvian farmers tending their Alpacas

and watched mile upon mile of Andean plateau pass by.

We entered the outskirts of Puno, turned a corner, and caught our first glimpse of the world’s highest navigable lake, Lake Titicaca.

There was an audible murmur from everyone on the coach as they caught their first view of the Lake, before the bus wound down the hillside into the city itself.

After dropping the first passengers at a hotel on the outskirts (where we caught our first glimpse of the ship Yavari which we’re hoping to look at tomorrow), we were next to be dropped off at our hostel, the Inkas Rest. This gave me a chance to climb on top of the van to help the driver with our luggage, which (rather sadly) I enjoyed immensely!

We were met at the door by Alfredo, the owner of the hostel. Our first impressions of Alfredo were that he was one of the friendliest, jolliest men we’ve ever met! He was constantly joking in a heavy Spanish accent, which he could switch effortlessly to an Essex accent as he’d lived in Davenport for a year, and wasted no time in taking the p**s out of my breathlessness from carrying the packs. He was also extremely helpful, letting us properly check in after we had a rest and telling us the areas in town that were safe after dark (highlighting these in green on a street map).

This was extremely useful, as it was turning dark and we needed to go out in search of food. So, armed with our highlighted street map, we headed towards the centre of town, only to abandon the safe streets after a block and follow our noses to the most salivating barbeque smell we’ve ever experienced!

The source of the smell was El Rancho, a chicken barbeque restaurant off the tourist trail and seemingly used only by the locals. Rows upon rows of chickens were cooking on rotisseries over charcoal fires, and for a quarter chicken, fries, salad and drink it came to only 10 Nuevo Soles each (around £2.00).

And it was without a doubt the most succulent, tasty chicken we have ever tasted in our lives! There was some sort of Peruvian spices on the skin which we wished we could identify as it beat anything we’d tasted before. The fact that it was simple fare, and definitely the sort of places that the locals frequented made it quite fantastic.

After leaving the restaurant, we headed through a couple of squares in Puno, namely Uno Square and Plaza De Armas (it seems like every town has a Plaza De Armas in Peru!). Between these was a pedestrian only street, which had the widest variety of restaurants we’d seen in ages. Quite surprisingly, our first impression of this area of Puno was that it was very similar to Austria, (a feeling we’ve also had in Cusco and Machu Picchu!). We can’t quite put our finger on why this is; maybe it’s a style they adopted due to the proximity of the mountains or maybe we’re just going crazy!

One thing about being this high up is that when the sun goes, the temperature plummets. Indeed, we had read before getting here that hundreds of children in the greater area of Puno had died of cold this year! Whilst we weren’t in danger of freezing, we headed back to the hostel and got under the thirty sheets on the bed (the hostel has no heating!) and relaxed for the night, safe and warm at the side of Lake Titicaca!