Wednesday 10 July 2002
We woke up at the cold Hotel Italia to face a snowy morning. We had booked ourselves for a two-day sail trip on the Titicaca Lake, but as we examined the heavy snowflakes falling down, we realized that the visibility would be very bad.
The guide fetched us as agreed and we drove around the city in the small minibus to pickup other tourist when a cell phone call announced, that no boats would be sailing this morning. The bus returned to the hotel and we had to wait for brighter weather.
After an hour we received the expected message: The trip was postponed to the day after. So, what to do with the day? We went for a walk. The snow seemed to be unexpected by the locals as well. Apparently this was the first snowy day in ten years and some tourists blamed it on the El Niño effect. We saw adult inhabitants throwing snowball at each other and building snowmen everywhere. Some snowmen were decorated very creatively with mouth, nose, scarf and even a bra. They are not without humor up here in the cold.
Puno is located in beautiful surroundings down to the Titicaca Lake. According to legend this was the place where the very first Inca was born. A statue of him is standing on top of a hill seeing the city and the beautiful lake. The city is about 80,000 inhabitants and founded in 1668. People here look poorer than we are used to see in other places. An example: we didn’t see that many taxis, but a lot of rickshaws instead.
We saw a lot of markets where you can buy anything: meat, vegetables, clothes and sanitary parts. The indoor market was mostly for locals. Here we saw everything from head of lamas to white dried potatoes. The old Indian women were very sweet, but rejected to let me take a photo of them.
In our guide we had read that Puno was a cheap place to buy Alpaca-wool clothes, but the selection could not live up to the choices we had in Cuzco and Lima. Still we found some of the good stuff, even raw Alpaca-wool for knitting. We ended up buying an extra bag just for our purchases.
We also spend the day finding a cheaper hotel. We moved from the 3-star Hotel Italia to the 2-star Hotel Zurit. The difference was very small, but the price almost the half – only US 20 and got an exciting and nice view to the street on top.
The hotels weren’t that important as we spend very little time there anyway. They were all very cold and quite boring. Instead we walk in the streets, visited stores and cafes, Internet cafes and shops, just to get some warmth and to have something to do. Later this evening we met two American girls who worked for free in a NGO-organization. Three months later they were ready to return to the hot summer in Florida, even though they had got a lot of experience and learning from their stay. We learned bit and pieces of the daily life in Peru from these girls as well.
After dinner we walked the pedestrian street and agreed with ourselves that we had nothing to do in a cold hotel room other than go to sleep, which seemed a bit early at 7pm. Instead we started our own little behaved ‘pub-crawl’. After the second restaurant we met Daniel and Randall from Los Angeles – actually for the second time this day. What a pleasant reunion. We had a very nice evening with the two nice guys, exchanged addresses – just for the case that they’ll step by in Europe or we’ll go to USA some day.
After some nice cups of “Vino Caliente” (hot red-wine with sugar) we returned to the hotel and to bed, asking for better weather the next day.