Goodbye Peru

After leaving Cusco, we caught a bus to Puno, the largest town on the Peruvian shores of Lake Titicaca (3820m) to spend some time, explore the lake and the surrounding region.

Our bus left at the reasonable time of 8:30am and was scheduled to take 6 hours to take us to Puno. Great, we thought, we'll grab some biscuits and bananas and have a late lunch by the lake in Puno. Not so great... turns out that our bus driver couldn't find third gear and so when we were 5 hours into the trip and we passed the half-way point, we knew we were in trouble. Hungry and grumpy at this point, the bus didn't even stop for us to buy some "chicolo con queso" from the ladies shouting at us at every pause. When we finally stopped at the local Juliaca airport for us to change busses, we were very relieved (especially after picking us some food at the airport). To make a long story short, we finally arrived in Puno at 5pm, 3 hours after we were supposed to. Recommadation: don't use the San Luis bus company!

Puno was ok, a little more basic and less attractive than Cusco but our hostel (Inka's Rest) was great and provided us with the opportunity to grab some much needed R&R after the last hectic few days.

The only tour that we managed was a boat trip to the floating islands in the Lake Titicaca which were built and habitated by the Uros, a pre-Inca people who have survived and kept many of their customs since that time. I can't say that we particularly enjoyed the visit as it seemed a little like a human zoo at times and there was a lot of pressure to buy some souvineers from them, but it was certainly a very different experience than anywhere else that we have visited so far.

We are back in Puno now and we found out this morning that there is a bus strike which means that we now won't be able to do our trip to the Coca Canyon as planned. So now we're going to head to Copacabana (in Boliva) a few days earlier instead.

We've had some real high and low points in Peru. The stay in the Amazon jungle is definately one of the highlights of the entire trip so far and the hike to see the ruins at Pisaq will stand out as one of my favourite days. However getting ill in Cusco and the bus trip to Puno will also be in the bottom list. We have enjoyed our time here and we are now looking forward to heading South and experiencing Bolivia and most of all, Argentina.

The Zoo

I was surprised to discover that after previously spending roughly 8 months in Singapore, my lovely husband had never been to the zoo here. Now, I'm not usually one for zoos as often you walk around the spartan cages and endure the sad-looking animals inside. This zoo however, is widely recognised as one of the best in the world and they use landscaping to separate the animals from us rather than using bars and this creates the illusion that you are up close and personal to the animals. So we remedied the oversight, and went to the zoo!



We choose a lovely day to go and the animals were out in full force. I particularly enjoyed the elephants show where they demonstrated some of the work that they used to do in the logging industry. They obviously liked their trainers (mahout) and joked around with them and the audience throughout the show.

The orangutans were everywhere, swinging on specially constructed vines over walkways where people were - no lack of stimulation in their lives!

The other animals seemed to fare just as well, see for yourself...












Night Safari
We decided to stay on into the evening and go to the night safari, a twin zoo to the main Singapore zoo which opened its doors at 7pm and closed well into the wee hours. The concept of the night safari was that so many animals sleep during the day and come alive at night when they hunt and feed and we never normally get the chance to observe them. So, why not have a zoo with that as the focus. Along with some random human entertainment (see right) we wandered along in the dark and saw large cats fishing in streams, giraffes eating, snow leopards. We were nearly knocked over by a flying fox swooping past, bats (shudder) and many other random animals.

Sadly no pictures though as it was 1. night and 2. no flash photography was allowed. Just a recommendation to go and enjoy it for yourself.