I think I have the answer to what’s most tiring in such a long trip. It’s not really the driving, or the lack of sleep, its the novelty and hassle of it all. Consider: discovering a new city every other day – new hotel – try and get a good price, compared with last stay, find a cheap and good place to eat, make sure that the hotel has a safe parking for the car, get all the damn stuff from the car and try and remember where the clean undies and shampoo are, find a supermercado to get drinks, chocolate and snacks for the next day, make sure to wake up between 7 and 8 so we won’t skip breakfast, and so forth… see, just typing all this list is tiring, let along going through it every day, or other day if we’re lucky to stay for two days in the same spot. What did I miss… oh, on top of all this “adaptive hassle”- that we can’t do without is the touristy stuff, such as going through the artisan shops and galleries, paying respects to the local cathedral, museums, parks and all the rest worth visiting. It kinda sounds whiny, but in retrospective, that’s what we paid for and we love it! I can almost recite by heart what’s in each and every of my bags and I can tell you the last time we filled up the car, how much, and that Serban left his flip-flops in the car again!

So… it’s last nite in Puno. Its rainy and cold. As the days are warm and sunny, the nights are getting colder and colder-like 12C. Today we saw the people on the floating islands on Lake Titicaca and I won a necklace because I guessed how deep was the water below their island- it was 16.5 m deep. What they do is, find little floating reed roots entangled in earth and mud and such, tie them together and cover them with fresh cut reeds constantly (and the new reeds need to be added every week and so as they rot underwater and get dry very fast when on the surface). And they float. But fire is a hazard. It got really lame when the women got together and sang us songs of gratitude because we visited them, they had Allouette, My Bonnie is over the ocean and such, Deutchland uber Alles and we cut them short when they mentioned they could sing in chinese and coreean.

In the afternoon Serban and I visited Sillustani, pre-inca burial grounds. Quite impressive. I think is nice to be important even in death. They built tall, perfectly circular towers where they mummified whole families and their wealth. It was really complicated how they cut the rocks to do that. No sculptures or designs or anything – just massive towers housing the important dead. Then we tried to take pictures of the approaching mega storm, but each time the camera clicked, the lightning was a 0.1 second off – but I was successful in getting a baby lightning in camera.

What else is new… I can tell the difference between an alpaca, a llama and a vicuna and that dehydrated potatoes are not that awful. And we had a full lunch today for which we paid 2.5$ for both of us. And it was totally eatable. More to come. Nity!
D.