The highest-located lake on earth

Day 11
2011-01-19
Puno & Titcaca Lake

Puno

Day 11 started early again – at least for me. I was up at around 6 am and went down in the lobby to talk a bit to the owners of the place – a young woman and her mother. The daughter had studied Italian some time ago and so we agreed on teaching each other some basic stuff – well with her it was more or less practicing while I had to learn things in Spanish. I had my first coffee together with an Australian couple who gave me nice tips about the area and a good restaurant we could go to that night.

After a nice chat Chris – my friend – was up and ready to hit town. First thing we did after a marvelous breakfast was to get our bus tickets for our next leg to Cusco. The terminal was nothing like the one we saw in Lima but hey – you gotta work with what you got. ;-) So we got the tickets and headed towards the Titicaca Lake. It was still very exhausting to walk around in the burning sun. Remember – the Titicaca Lake is at an altitude of 3810 m or almost 11000 feet which makes it the highest-located lake of the world (!).

The Titicaca Lake

I have to be honest on one thing: Puno itself is not beautiful and wasn’t it for the lake, we would have never come here I guess. As you can see on the pictures, the whole city is a brownish mess with some colored sparks on it. It is dirty, it’s noisy and there’s not much to see there. Yes I know – there are many churches, another Plaza De Armas of course and then the islands on the lake such as the Uros Islands. Nevertheless it didn’t feel like a place I could spend a week in. Yes – it was nice to see the lake which is enormous. And yes, the surrounding mountains and hills are nice. But still – I don’t think I have to go there a second time. Maybe Cobacabana in Bolivia is worth a visit…but my future travel plans don’t include that for now.

Back to our tour…we had a nice lunch at the lake and then we went to the pedestrian zone to do some window shopping, coffee drinking and relaxing.

In the evening we went out for dinner and then to bed cause at that altitude exhaustion forces you to sleep more than usual. It still was a nice day but we were happy to be leaving the next day.