Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca (7th Oct)

Originally I wanted to come here just so I could say Tit and it actually be okay. Having travelled a bit in Peru, however, it was repeatedly reccomended to us as a beautiful place to visit. And so here we are, after a six hour coach ride through the desert on a bus with no loo. When Fo and I realised this, while still sitting in the bus station in Arequipa (its the first thing we scope out on buses) panic set in. We both rushed off the bus for an emergency "just-in-case" wee and then didnt drink a drop of water for six hours. We sat on the only bus in the world that has negative leg room, not speaking and reading avidly in an attempt to ignore the heavy fear that we would need to wee. Thankfully the bus stopped. Once. And we had a chance to relieve ourselves at the road side.

Understandably, last night we had headaches, maybe due to the altitude (that was our drug barons favourite thing - he blamed everything on the altitide. I guess thats why he stole our car), maybe we were dehydrated. Our bellies, rumbling and gurgling our whole bus ride, were also of slight concern. We give each other daily updates of the "movements." The consitency, the frequency, the amount. We have some charcoal tablets that are meant to firm things up and these we keep close at hand. As things stand we,re both doing pretty well, interesting things are stirring and we remain curious, a little concerned but pretty happy none-the-less. I,ll keep you posted. Needless to say, today is a day of bland food - dry crackers and cereal, just to see how it helps movements.

I suppose eating llama and guinea pig last night didn,t help matters. We had dinner with the happiest couple in the world who encouraged us to take a risk (something we,d sworn to never do again in life post-drug baron). Bloody risk takers....

This morning after our usual cake for breakfast, today I took it with matte coca (coca leaf tea!) we caught the crappiest boat in the world to the floating islands of Uros. The villagers there originally fled the rule of the Incas hundreds of years ago and built these floating villages out of reeds. They,re literally floating and are maintained every second week as the bottom layers rot. It was quite toursitey but pretty interesting. I think my favourite part was actually the boat that took us there. The captain and his son puttered us over extremely slowly - the crappiest boat in the world being powered by the worlds weakest and oldest outboard. The poor engine ran the journey with petrol spouting out the pump and seemed to spend more time coasting silently than spluttering. Our two hour tour took four hours as we spent the majority of time blown gently into the reeds. While Captain Dad exerted warrior like efforts to get it started again, his son was helped by Fo in baling out the ever re-filling bilge.

We,re on dry land again now, safe and sound. Just about to go and buy more memory cards for our cameras as we,ve filled ours and in our last attempt to dump the photos onto Cd,s we suspect we wiped all of Fo,s pictures. You know what? I absolutely love that even though the most absurd and possibly unlucky things have happened to us} still Fo and I seem to have the biggest hoot of any of the other grinas we meet. Eternally optimistic for sure.

So far today we,ve had "The-past-halfway" high five in celebration of today being our three week anniversary in South America. Hopefully its smooth sailing from here!

Happy anniversary to all.

Camille

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