Another day, another airport. Officially our “tour” ends tomorrow, but the sightseeing finished yesterday. Today is designated as travelling to Lima and tomorrow the itinereary is ‘Depart Lima’. Check out of the hotel was 1100 so we slept till 1000, checked out and walked to the main street for breakfast before returning at 1230 for the transfer to the airport.

Puno doesn’t have an airport so we had to go to Juliaca. The best attribute of Juliaca is that it is the ‘Gateway to Puno’, while in turn Puno is the ‘Gateway to Lake Titicaca’. Without the lake, neither is worth visiting. It is still an hour and a quarter before the plane leaves and I have sampled all the airport has to offer. There are two men getting a shoe shine in different parts of the airport. Shining shoes is big business in Peru. As we walked through the Plaza de Amas this morning there were five people getting their shoes shined and a sixth shiner was having a rest. Had I known this before, I might have worn my business shoes just to save me cleaning them myself. It looks as if our 1515 flight is boarding at 1345, but I have run out of things to write.

The plane has not arrived, but I just had a packet of snacks that are perfect for the indecisive. There were chips, doritos, twisties and another crispy snack all in the one packet. It’s lik when you walk around the house the morning after a big party and pour all the left-overs into one bowl. I hope they start selling them in Australia.

Most of today was spent in transit on a bus between Cusoc and Puno. We had only two stops in a six and a half hour bus ride. The first stop was at La Raya Pass which is 4,321 metres and the highest point we have been to so far. There is not much there except some toliets (50 centimos) and locals selling “shit with llamas on it”. The 50c gives you a few piece of toilet paper and the man comes with a bucket of water to flush for you when you are finished. In most South American countries the sewer can only handle things that you have eaten first, so toilet paper is put in the bin next to the toilet.

Our next step was Juliaca, just to drop off some passengers. The town is a dump, but we have to return here to catch a plane to Lima. The bus broke down just outside Juliaca. Well not so much broke down, but one of the engine pipes got a hole in it. A little bandage seemed to fix it.

Soon we were in Puno, which is a bit of a dump of a city. It is on the shores of Lake Titicaca which is the highest navigable lake in the world. The town has a lot of unfinished houses. They mostly have one storey with a few support columns and reinforcing steel sticking out of the top. This is apparently because the owneers don’t pay taxes (land tax and rates presumably) until the house is complete. As a result the place looks totally crap. This applies to many Peruvian cities we have seen. Read the rest of this entry »