April 27, 2000
Day 188 To Taguile to Puno
Patrick gets up early, before sunrise, to use the bathroom. It’s a small whitewashed building, phone booth size, with no door and two window openings, behind our house. Next to it a donkey is tied up, so it can stick its head through the widow opening. The room consist of 4” hole in the concrete slab. No water to flush of course.
After breakfast of french fries and more dumplings, we are walked back to the harbour. We don’t know if we were fed any of the guinea pigs we saw in the kitchen. We get back on the boat and sail for Taguile, the other island in this part of Lake Titicaca. It’s about an hour boat ride, the lake is quite choppy this morning. From the boat dock on the north side of the island we follow a trail to the main village higher up the center of the island.
This place is visited a lot more by tourists than Amantami. Quite a few people come here just for the day on boats from Puno. The kids are quite persistent in their requests for “caramelos” or money, or try to sell you small friendship bracelets quite aggressively. There is a real nice square in the village with a nice church and city gate. We get an explanation on the traditional dress the people here wear. By the color of their woolen hats and the way they wear them you can see the marital status of the males and whether they are “looking” or not.
We walk across the island, have lunch at a small restaurant, and descend a long series of stone steps called the “gringo killer” to another harbour on the west side of the island. Our boat is there for the trip back to Puno. That takes about four hours. We are glad we did a two day trip, it would have been a long day otherwise. In the evening, we drink a beer at a bar that plays Dire Straits, and have dinner with Inge, Lori and two more girls from our tour. A nice evening.
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