Our first stop in the morning was to look at the rural market in the village of Acora, just south of Puno. It was known as a place where people barter their produce, and we saw a cheerful lady who obviously ruled the roost, accepting wheat from different ladies and tossing them bags of vegetables in exchange. (She also accepted two mini panettone from someone! Panettone were everywhere as we travelled...)
The market was a lot less frenetic than ones we had seen in Asia, and it was fun to walk around to look at the people and produce - heaps of potatoes, wool, sheep meat jerky, fish from the lake, corn with leaves peeled back to display the large husks... Ladies were dressed in their traditional clothing with coloured skirts, attachments to their hair (to make it grow); and a smaller number of gentlemen with formal dark suits. They were distinctly wary of us as we walked around, and we resorted to taking distant shots to be discreet.
We drove to a nearby village to take a walk up to a viewpoint of the lake, accompanied by a little puppy that had obviously done this before. Here, as at the market, people spoke more Aymara or Quechua than Spanish - our guide said that he only started speaking Spanish at age 14. A very friendly old lady who was out walking with her cow greeted us and shook our hands and talked to us, as we nodded uncomprehendingly.
Lake Titicaca, which, if you look upside down and perhaps if you've had a couple of beers, looks like a cat catching a rabbit. It's the highest navigable lake in the world, and the new thing I learned about it is that it is very cold - average temperature of only 9 degrees. We dipped our fingers into the Lake and took a short stroll, before heading back into Puno.
For the afternoon we were taking a boat trip out to the Uros Islands - but first we stopped at one of a line of identical restaurants and ate some delicious lake trout with garlic sauce, with another huge portion of chips and rice (I was lying the night before when I said I wouldn't have any more chips).
The Uros Islands are man made and famous for being built on reeds, and have developed as a tourist destination in the last 20 years. We stopped at one island where we saw a demonstration of how the islands and houses are built and took the opportunity to dress up ridiculously in local clothes, before being offered standard-issue merchandise which we declined politely (and gave a contribution for letting us dress up). We'd been warned that the islands were touristy, but the brief visit was interesting and we weren't overly hassled.
Back on land, we popped into the rather austere Puno cathedral as we walked around town, and finally enjoyed another traditional meal - rocotto relleno, peppers stuffed with spicy beef mince, before heading back for an early night.
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