We had the luck of being in Puno during Candelaria, which mostly consists of people dancing around in traditional clothing and carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary from place to place. The hard thing is that even though there’s a rough schedule of when things will happen, almost nothing happens when it says it will and quite a lot happens when nothing’s scheduled, so you basically just have to watch out for whatever is going on. February 2nd is the actual Candeleria celebration is supposed to take place, but that was one of the duller days we saw there since all they really did was cary Mary’s statue from church to church with a small parade. The coolest part of this was they created street art out of sawdust and flowers, then marched Mary straight through it all to destroy it. The night before there was a random fireworks show and more parades. The night after there were parades too. And I think the night after that, but I’m starting to forget.
Aside from watching all the dancing and parades, we spent a bit of time adjusting to the altitude which is around 12,000 ft. Kim slept a lot the first day and I was just winded walking around. It also gets cooooold at night, one night hailing for a long time, so we each bought another sweater. They’re supposedly 100% alpaca, but since we bought them for around $6-7 on the street I doubt it, although they’re very soft and warm. I almost bought a really expensive sweater from the women’s coop there, but it had a hole and 3 days I checked back to see if they could get it fixed and they didn’t, so I gave up on them. Of course they always said it would be fixed the next day. The poor communication never seemed to end in this city.
We met another couple on our tour of Lake Titicaca’s islands (see other post for more on that) and ended up spending a few days with them since we had so much in common. They’re vegetarian and have traveled more extensively than we have, so we had a ton to talk about which was very refreshing. They found an amazing pizza place called El Buho (the owl), for me amazing mostly because they had a delicious garlic dipping sauce.
We had a crazy, frustrating experience trying to go to Bolivia at the end. Basically, we got to the Bolivian border and found out that since December they’re charging Americans $100 per person to enter. Of course, the border town doesn’t take credit cards or have any ATMs, so we couldn’t have paid if we wanted to. Argh! Change of plans. Seems like a fairly dumb policy to me since now they get none of our money. Of course, they’re just doing it because the US does the same thing to their citizens. We were ready to get out of developing countries anyway, so now we’re headed to Chile.
Even though the Bolivia thing was bad, we had one good experience. We bought our bus tickets through All Ways Travel (what’s up with peru’s terrible flash based websites) and they refunded the unused portion of our ticket and actually apologized for the inconvenience. This is the first time anyone from any company in Peru has apologized to us for any kind of mixup, and there have been plenty of those. Most people just come up with some bogus excuse for why things didn’t work out and don’t offer anything to compensate. Anyway, the staff is very friendly I recommend you book stuff with them. They have two locations and the one we went to is at Jr. Tacna 281 Office 204 in Puno, telefax +51 51 355552. They also run a volunteer project to help some of the local islands setup small libraries to encourage reading, something badly needed on these barely literate islands.
We also went to the Coca Museum in Puno, which was very worthwhile. It’s a tiny museum, but has lots of info and knowledgeable staff. They have some of the local clothes so I got to try the womens weird skirts. There’s a bigger coca museum in La Paz we read, but now we’re not going there.
From here it’s back trhough Arequipa and on to Chile!