Lake Titicaca and the uros community Puno, Peru.

This is the killifish

A couple of days ago, we took a 10 hour train ride from Cusco to Lake Titicaca which is located in Puno, Peru. The train ride was very fancy, they fed us a good lunch and the views were of mountains and valleys. We saw alpacas, llamas, dogs, pigs, horses, and donkeys. The train was very old-schooled and looked like it was from the 1930’s. Fun fact, Lake Titicaca is the highest altitude lake in the world at 12,510 feet above sea level and is shared by Peru and Bolivia. 

The house we stayed in on Lake Titicaca required us to take a boat from a small port because the house is actually on an island called Uros. The Uros people are the local tribe who live there. Their houses are built on floating reeds and they have to switch out the reeds every 4 years to deal with buoyancy and decaying. Our rental was an A frame house (my first time staying in an A frame house and on floating reeds!)The people we were renting from live next to our rental and they had a little boy that we played with. We would play Uno together which was fun until he started coming over every day! They brought breakfast, lunch, and dinner and the food was simple but so enjoyable and good. Alfredo (the owner) brought us fishing and we were aiming to catch Andean trout (which is rainbow trout and brown trout, after they had a baby). We had no luck. Alfredo took us net fishing later because wanted to catch bait for Andean trout. Some bait we caught with the net was Killifish which only lives in Lake Titicaca. When brought in the net we caught 26 Killifish which is a lot considering he usually only catches 2 or 3 every time. The Killifish was not successful as bait. I never thought trout fishing was this hard. I am guessing it was hard because it is wild trout so they're not as dumb as stocked trout. 

It was a new experience for me to stay on an island with reeds and with tribal people. It was hard to get exercise or to walk anywhere because it was an island of reeds. It was cold (even though it was their summer). The highs were in the 50’s and low’s were like 38 degrees. There were sunny days but also a lot of rain and very windy. On the cold nights, the bed almost suffocated me because there were like a foot of heavy-stacked blankets. At night, it was very nice and pretty because you could see the far away city lights and the stars above were so bright. In the end, I felt like it was too rustic for me.