Peru, Puno, 1-2 Feb 2012

Left Cuzco at 0700 found my way onto the highway took about 30min this is a big city climbed to 3800-4000m and stayed there the whole way to Puno. Not much traffic but lots of villages and some trucks long straight stretches doing 100-120kph most of the time, made good time until Juliaca took half an hour getting through, a local biker showed me the way through the town after that short ride to Puno. Stopped and got the Nokia out started Google Maps using the maps I had cached earlier it got a lock on the GPS satellites and showed me the way to the hotel my first time using this method because Nokia does not have a map of Puno, arrived at 1300, 388km in 6 hours. Very narrow one way streets, booked an all day tour of the lake islands tomorrow SOL50 they also accept credit cards here with no fee, the altitude is now 3850m and it makes me hungry and dizzy.

The Islands tour was a disaster, the rickety old boats top speed was 12kph and it was doing about half that most of the time, it took 3 hours to get to an island to look at a village with some native crafts then 3 hours back a total waste of time, then we went to what I really wanted to see which were the floating islands, villages built on clumps of plants, very interesting. I could have done this on a separate 2 hour tour from Puno instead of being crammed into a boat for 8 hours, you have been warned.

After I got back I arranged to go to La Paz, Bolivia by bus and avoid having to export/import my bike to Bolivia and back again into Peru 3 days later. Bus fare $30 return, and the hotel agreed to keep my bike in their car park and they had a secure storage room for my stuff. I did all of this while there was a thunderstorm and the lights went out and I nearly fell on my head when I stepped out of the travel agent and there was ice on the road hahahaha.


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4 Responses to Peru, Puno, 1-2 Feb 2012

  1. We only did the tour of the floating islands, about a 20min ferry ride out. We went from one island to another and there was the option of taking a local boat made from reeds/straw etc. There was a massive storm coming that only we seemed to notice! So we caught the ferry and the rest of the tour got stranded on the other boat and had to be towed in!

    • desmonc says:

      I should have asked more questions about the tour, in Belize the water taxi to the islands travelled at 50kph a rocketship, I was probably expecting something like that, the only thing worth seeing are the floating islands anyway, the storm came in about an hour after we got back.

  2. P.S. I can’t believe you are driving on those roads!

    • desmonc says:

      The main Panamerican highway in Peru is good for the most part though there are bad sections which makes it difficult to plan my next stop never knowing how long it is going to take to get anywhere and some of the towns on the map do not even have a Petrol station let alone a hotel.

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