Transportation strike and floating islands

This will be brief.

We ended up spending 4 days instead of 2 in Cuzco due to the transportation system being on strike. It really sucked for one day, then God sent us some Chilean friends at the hostel to hang out with and play Power Uno with, which was fantastic. Wednesday we visited some more ruins and then rode horses, watched a weird native dance show, then got our things ready to leave. The bus from Cuzco to Puno was delayed for 2 hours because 18 of the seats had been sold twice, first to Peruvians then to foreigners, and the Peruvians were the ones who weren´t being let on. They were outside the bus yelling, hitting the doors, pointing fingers, and waving their tickets in the air for nearly two hours, and the person whose fault it was was nowhere to be found. So the foreigners on the bus griped about the Peruvians, the Peruvians griped about the foreigners, and eventually it was resolved and we all made it to Puno, albeit 2 hours late.

Puno and Lake Titicaca are very very cold, due to the high altitude and the fact that the water keeps things chilly. We killed some time at a hotel in Puno before departing at 9am in our tour boat for the famous floating islands. It was weird to be in a tour, since we are so used to doing everything on our own, trying to be the least touristy tourists possible. But in this case we had to be tourists, we had to listen to our guide give overly-animated explanations of everything, take pictures from our cushy seats in the boat. And it was good. The floating islands were really cool, very interesting. Amazing to think that people live on islands made of reeds, that their daily life happens there. From there we went to Amantaní, a non-floating island where we spent that night. We stayed with host families because there are no hotels on this island. I can´t really write in much detail about all we did there due to time limitations... but it was awesome and weird and cold and delicious.

The next day we boated over to the island Taquile, which was also beautiful and slightly less exciting, mostly because we were tired from traveling. Made it back to Puno that afternoon, and had a lovely evening of doing very little. That included me going to bed at 9pm.

**side note -- some sheep just walked past the window outside, bleeting and baah-ing vehemently.**

Today we´re going to Copacabana (which is on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca), hopefully to hang out on Isla del Sol and Isla de la Luna, and we´ll spend the night there. Sunday afternoon back to Puno, kill time there, then overnight bus to Tacna. In the afternoon we take a taxi from Tacna to Arica, and at 7:40 fly from Arica to Santiago, then hopefully catch the last bus from Santiago to Valparaiso. Then FINALLY, we´ll be in Chile, in Francisco´s house, snuggled up with Maria Paz, eating empanadas de manzana. Yessssssssssssssssss.....

We´re ready to be back.. tired from traveling, but doing all we can to enjoy every minute of this part of the trip. Today in Bolivia and Peru. 2 days to Chile. 7 days to Texas.