[Above: The floating village of Uros on Lake Titicaca.]

Journal by Colin McAuliffe

Today I have the fortunate pleasure of being the person to write the blog for what was probably our most action packed day of adventure yet. We started our morning at 9am, when a minibus picked us up at our hotel in Puno Peru for a tour of the reed islands of Lake Titicaca. We all piled in the van and prepared for our three hour journey. We had no idea how interesting it would be.

When we got to the dock it was overcast and cold, really cold -- I mean 4 layers cold. We had a few minutes to buy snacks and then we were herded onto our boat by our tour-guide Mairo. He began to explain the history of the floating islands.

The people of the islands were originally land dwellers, but when the Inca came to the Titicaca region, the people were forced to hide on the lake. The lake, being filled with reeds offered great materials for building, so the people decided to build their own islands. They created these floating homelands by carefully weaving layers upon layers of reeds together on top of a base of floating reed roots. The islands only last ten or twelve years and then the people must start building a new one. They test the stability of the islands by digging down through the layers of reeds and sniffing for the smell of decomposition. Of course, the islands immediately begin to decompose as soon as they are built so there is always a smell of sulfur when they dig down (when we smelled it, the stink smelled vaguely of farts and rotten eggs) however when it is time to build a new island apparently the small is horrendous.

There are over twenty islands with up to ten families that live on each. Certain islands have schools and there is a hospital too. Only ten of the islands actually allow tourists to visit them and the people that live there make their living though the money that tourists spend to go there and from the typical stuff the tourists buy. These islands are more technologically advanced than those that don't allow tourists. They have solar power and I was amused to find a television in one of the huts.

Anyway, Mairo was a great guide. We started off on one island where he explained all about the lifestyle and showed us the inside of one of the huts, which I might add was quite small, closet-sized even, and slept up to six. The weather then cleared, sun and all and we then took a cool little reed, little man-powered boat over to another island which was pretty much the same as the first, except that an ingenious old lady had thrown together a small potato patch in a corner of the island on a pile of decomposing reed roots. Mairo had answers to all our many questions such as, where do these people go to the bathroom? The answer was that they built little island off the main ones where they could poop in shallow latrines and then dry the waste so that it wouldn't pollute the water.

So, we finished up our tour of the island and returned to our hotel to prepare for another exciting journey, our first confluence. Now, confluences are a little weird, and actually upon first hearing about them I thought them to be ridiculously stupid, however I eventually grew to love the idea. A confluence is the spot where lines of latitude and longitude meet. There is a website called www.confluence.org that lists every confluence in the world and whether or not it has been "bagged". Bagging a confluence is when you take your GPS and go to the exact spot of the confluence and take a picture of you and your GPS reading all zeros. The lines we were trying to reach were longitude 70 and
latitude 16.

So, Mairo, our guide from the reed islands met us at about 4pm, not having a clue what he was getting into. I think he actually thought that he was taking us on a tour of some old funerary tower ruins. When he finally did realize what we were doing he said that it was "completely crazy" but that he liked it.

So we all piled into the Land Rovers an drove about twenty five kilometers out of Puno. It was pouring rain and Nick, GPS in hand, was carefully monitoring the spot at which we would have to turn off the road, and when the time came he called the cars to a halt over our new radios. We all pulled over and went to check out where we would be going, which was basically swampland. At first Nick was insistent on us walking almost a mile out into the swampy field, but with a little encouragement, the team convinced him that we could drive it.

Nancy went ahead on foot as our scout, to tell us when ponds and whatnot were in front of us. Eventually we came to a point that Nancy said we could not cross, Adam was disbelieving of this, so he took off his shoes and waded across the stream that was our obstacle. We all agreed that the creek was shallow enough to cross and from there on was complete off-road mayhem.

The two cars we had packed full of people began to race across the swamp towards the confluence, blasting through ponds and ravines like we had nothing better to do. Our car had a great advantage, Nancy had taken a spot on the rear ladder where she could see over the top of the car and yell directions at us so we could avoid the pitfalls of the swamp. The other car did not think to do this and within twenty minutes they were stuck in an irrigation ditch.

We spent a good half an hour in the rain digging the car out and then thanks to our Extreme Outback Recovery Kits we yanked the car to safety. Another twenty minutes ripping through the swamp and we bagged our first confluence. The team all got back out of our cars in the rain and Neil took some pictures of us with the GPS to prove what we had done.

I had a blast on our little excursion and I look forward to doing it again. After all was said and done, we piled back in the cars and headed back to Puno for dinner, which would turn out to be our third adventure of the day.

So, when we got back to Puno we originally had planned to go to the restaurant that we had eaten lunch at, but Mairo said he knew a better place, so we let him lead. We arrived at our restaurant and sat down to receive our menus at this point Todd, Neil, Adam, and myself decided to do something we had been talking about since we first got to Peru and that was to eat cuy. Now, cuy is considered a major delicacy in Peru, but in the States we consider cuy a pet -- a guinea pig in fact. So myself and the aforementioned guys ordered up our little guinea pigs and waited to see what happened.

When they arrived I was a little taken aback. The Cuy looked like one of the rats from the Muppets. It was deep fried with its head still on, and mine was looking at me very suspiciously, kind of like it was about to get up and say, "Hey buddy, what the heck do you think your doing?" Anyway, I paid five bucks for the thing so I had to eat it. At first bite it wasn't that bad, it kind of reminded me of rabbit but a little more greasy, however after a while, when I had exposed the skeleton and everyone kept talking about how cute guinea pigs are, it started to get harder to eat the thing. Not to mention the fact that there was barely any meat on it, mainly just skin and bones. By the end I was thoroughly grossed out, and had to give up. Mairo gladly accepted the head, which he tore the meat of with gusto. That was the end of it, I'll never eat cuy again.

This was, I'm pretty sure the most active day on the entire Longitude expedition, I'm hoping we have more of them, only without the eating of household pets, because that was seriously gross.

Colin
colin@drivearoundtheworld.com

Logbook for January 16th, Day 77
Start: Puno, Peru, 1600
N: 15* 50.480'
W: 70* 01.706'
Finish: Puno, Peru, 2000
N: 15* 50.480'
W: 70* 01.706'
Mileage: 028
Notes: Today was epic. From 0930 to about 1230, we toured Puno's biggest tourist attraction, the floating islands of Uros. There is an indigenous people who have lived on floating reed islands on Lake Titikaka since the days of the Inca. We were amazed to visit these people on their islands and had a hard time imagining what it would be like to spend your whole life on an island that is smaller than a high school infield. You can't run on the reeds that make up the ground, and you have no hope of biking. You'd spend most of your days fishing and tending to the islands if you are a man, and women would spend most of their time watching the children, cooking, and making handicrafts to sell to tourists. After the Uros visit, we searched for and found, with the help of our Garmin GPS, a point where lines of longitude and lines of latitude crossed. It was in the middle of a farmer's field on the outskirts of Puno. More on the significance of this later in Colin's journal. The day was good. Tomorrow we leave for Bolivia.(N.O.)

Help support our cause: The LONGITUDE Expedition is the longest journey ever attempted with a focus on Parkinson's Disease. The Drive Around the World team aims to raise money for Parkinson’s Disease research by driving four certified pre-owned Land Rover Discoverys around the globe following lines of longitude. Readers are encouraged to pledge small amounts of money per expedition-kilometer via a pledge form that can be found on our Parkinson’s page by clicking here. 100% of donations received go directly to Parkinson's research and all who donate $10 or more will be entered into a raffle to win an expedition-equipped Land Rover Discovery.