We managed to find a great Italian restaurant for our tea, and, sated, we headed back to the hotel. After a nice breakfast we headed to the bus station. We had another goodbye kiss, a few waves, at on point I thought she was going to cry. Again, I reiterate, if you stay in Arequipa you MUST STAY HERE, it´s wonderful!

Our bus was scheduled for 9am and as we arrived at 8.45 it was clear there was a problem...apparently there had been some demonstrations in Puno a couple of days back which resulted in them bricking the Ormeno buses...so they put ours back 5 hours in the hope the protests would have subsided...after hanging around the station for the full 5 hours (we figured if we left they would almost certainly bring the bus forward just to spite us!!) we boarded, and got through to Puno without inncident. Well, the only incident was me getting a nose bleed, well it is very high here I guess. The guesthouse we booked into is nice, no cable though,a d they told us last night that no hotel in Puno has cable...today we founf this to be a complete lie, but more of this later. We felt the altitude on climbing the stairs, OK so I´m not the fittest bloke in the world but I don´t usually pant for 2 mins/nearly faint after climbing the stairs...maybe those steaks in Argentina are having an effect. Anyway with our tour for today booked we headed out for a great Calzone, the nicest thing we´ve had in Peru by far.

Puno itself is not a nice place, one pedestrian mall is flanked on all sides by scary alleys and scary pople, it´s a definite walk back to the hotel with chest puffed out looking hard kinda place (not that I´m very good at that...)

So to today, we were picked up at 7.20 (!) by our guide, Percy, WHO SPOKE PERFECT ENGLISH!!! We headed to the port where we boarded the worlds slowest boat...all in all today we spent 6 hours on it, I could have swam faster. However the trip itself was excellent, which was a pelasant surprise. The first port of call on Lake Titicaca was the floating villages of the Uros, just 20 mins (about 100 metres I think) away. Although heavily touristed (on4e island per boat seemingly) we got a fascinating insight into how they live. The islands themselves are about 2m thick and are made of reeds, the same reeds they use to make their houses, boats, and even eat! They tether them in the shallow parts of the islands although ain heavy storms the islands often break their moorings. We met a couple who were 19 and 17 and already had 2 kids, they marry at 14/15 apparently. The man does manly stuff like fishing and the woman does the cooking etc...although for some reason Percy claimed this was feminism working...not sure on that one old chap...

We then got treated to all their crafts/handiwork and although we weren´t under real pressure to buy it felt a bit forced in the way it happened, kind of, here´s our culture now buy...

As you know by now we are the ultimate tourists so we took a trip in a reed boat, driven/piloted/captained by Julio who I´d recently not bought somehting from. He was a big lad, and when he demanded (not asked for) a 2 soles ´tip´we all obliged...

So onto Taquile, an island made of rock and the like where we spent 3 hours wandering round getting a real feel for the Peru of say a couple of hundred years ago, although they have finally now got electricity and within 2 years over 80% of homes have got TV...the locals wree all dressed in traditional clothing and you got to see many knitting hats, tending to flocks of sheep, or just doing they´re thing. It was fascinating. Percy told us all about the knittin ghats ritual and it goes something like this. All the 14/15 y.o. boys have to knit hats and when they are courting the hats are taken home by the girls who then pour a load of water into them. The theory goes that the boys that work hardest and thus produce the better quality, no corners cut hats, have hats that don´t leak. The workshy fops on the other hand have leaky shoddy ´Friday afternoon´ hats and do not make as good suitors...I guess if Darwin had landed here not the Galapagos (pretty hard as it´s a landlocked lake at 12,000 feet) he may have worked out natural selection on this basis eventually too...

On the way back to Puno it cropped up in conversation that our hotel had said nowhere in Puno had cable...I asked the ever knowledgable Percy and he said that was complete and utter bollocks (not his words) and that a number of hotels did. We, are now firmly esconced in one, but it doesn´t have ESPN2, the channel we need...however I think it is being shown on TV5, a French channel, which we do have. So I´m going to have to settle for the match in French, with a 4am kickoff. I am under strict, turn the volume, brightness, contrast down instructions, and under no illusion that if I wake my better half I will be a dead man.

So off to Cusco tomorrow, we´ve got high hopes for the place. Helen and Rich are arriving on Sunday so we´re going to try to arrange the Machu Pichu thang with them.