The Floating Islands

Having only 4 hours of sleep we dragged ourselves out of bed and headed down to the docks of Lake Titticaca to catch a boat to the Floating Islands. Now there are a million boats down there and a million tourists, but who got on our boat at teh last minute? The Welsh boys of course. WE could smell the liquor coming off them first and then saw them. haha So we spent another morning with them touring the Floating Islands off of Puno. The islands were amazing. We really disliked Puno so we were discouraged waking up thinking maybe this just wasn´t worth it and Puno was a total bust. But thank goodness the islands were amazing. Everything on them is made out of reeds, including the foundation, which is reeds and mud. It´s sort of weird when you walk bec. in some spots teh reeds aren´t as thick and you sink a little and some water comes in. It´s pretty amazing to think people live on these, but they do. And there homes are made out of reeds although some of the islands have sturdier looking houses made out of wood, etc. The children here were esp. beautiful. I made friends with one little girl in particular who was just so so sweet. I have a hard time being a tourist and taking pictures of the people bec. i feel like i´m exploiting them. But this one little girl I talked to and then when I felt comfortable taking her picture I asked her if it was ok. ONce i did i showed her the picture and she got such a kick out of it. so i would take a couple more and then show her. Before you knew it she had a friend come over and i repeated the same thing with her. They really were lovely kids and it was fun to show them what cameras can do.
While at the islands we also took a reed boat over to one of the islands. The boat is actually really really comfortable and was so smooth sailing across the water. and NO, this water was NOTHING like the near death experience at Isla Magdelena in Punta Arenas last year, thank god!
We came back to Puno around 12:30 had lunch and then got on the bus from hell to get to Arequipa.