Spent the day in Puno, Peru where we visited the Uros Islands. They are islands built by sea straw/grass and house about 2000 people on Lake Titicaca. The tour itself was quite "touristy", but it's not that hard to uderstand how difficult it is to live on these islands. Originally the people escaped out on the lake to hide from the Inkas in order to keep their culture and avoid war. They have remained on the lake ever since (500+ years). It's a very cold and damp environment (the lake is situated at 3800 meters) and many people develop rheumatism (sp?) before the age of 50 which makes them unable to work.
We met a couple from Quebec today. They started travelling by bike from Calgary 15 months ago and have biked all the way down here! Very impressive considering that a lot of the recent biking would have been at very high altitude. They will continue to bike until April of 2010 and then they will return to "normal life".
Tomorow morning we are heading to Bolivia. Hopefully we can connect a bunch of busses that will take us all the way down to Potosi or Uyuni, but we might have to spend a day in La Paz.
I'm really looking forward to seeing the Salt Flats!
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