Puno - A Very Random Place

"Puno, Puno, Puno, Puuuuuuuuuuuno!"

On entering any bus station in Southern Peru you are likely to be bombarded by at least three people screaming this in your face (unless of course you are in Puno, when the cry is "Arequi-Arequi-Arequi-Arequipaaaa!). Puno, it seems is a transport hub.

The city itself is not enthralling, despite being next to stunning lake Titicaca. It is dirty, crowded, and within the town itself, there ain't much to do. However, behind this uninviting facade lie some fairly interesting and sometimes downright bizarre sights. For a start there are no supermarkets here. The building entitled "Supermarcado Central" is in fact a half-built structure, where hundreds of streat sellers have rented or bought various plots of land in which to sell their wares. It's basically a chaotic street market with a roof over it. We weren't exactly expecting Sainsbury's but this still came as a shock.

Next is the pedalo pond. What could be better than spending a lazy afternoon in a duck shaped pedalo, floating about on one of South America's ugliest and most poluted bodies of water? And what a view!

More spectacular, are the funery towers at Silustani, just outside of Puno. The Quechua people used to bury several or more of their dead in these towers by stuffing them one after the other through a hole at the base. Very strange.

Even more exciting than the towers themselves however, were the gangs of alpacas wandering around them. We met a farmer who allowed us to pick up one that was just a week old. Liz got very excited about this, and you can see her with the baby alpaca in one of the pictures on the right. Here's me "interacting" with a couple of them:

Another great moment was going to see the HMS Yavari, a ship moored on Lake Titicaca in Puno:


The story of this ship is incredible. An English company was commissioned by the Peruvian government to build it in 1861. The ship was built in pieces, 2766 pieces in all, in Birmingham and then transported by ship from England, all the way around Cape Horn, to Arica in Northern Chile. The pieces were then taken by train to Tacna in Peru, where they were loaded onto mules, and then carried across and up the Andes to Lake Titicaca. The ship was then assembled by the lake at Puno. The transportation process alone took over 6 years, and the ship was finally launched in 1870, nine years after it was commissioned. Why they didn't just build the thing in Puno in the first place is beyond me. Anyway, they built the ship, then realised they didn't have any coal to run it, so powered it on dried llama dung! In the 1940s it fell into disrepair, but has since been salvaged and recommissioned by an English benefactor, who felt it was an interesting piece of history. It is. We saw it, got given a tour round by the present captain, and had great fun pretending to be him on the bridge:

That's pretty much it for Puno. What a weird place. Apart from the "Hedge Garden" and "Temple of Fertility" of course, which I think the less said about the better ...