Going up and up the valley we reach the city of Puno. All the houses are in bare bricks without any painting on them, and they therefore look incredibly homogeneous spreading from the shore of Lake Titicaca into the mountains around.
The Lake, and the city of Puno, are at an impressive altitude of almost 4000m above sea level, but being almost in a plateau the surrounding mountains don’t look so high and the whole background looks more hilly than Andean.

We decided to treat ourselves with a good hotel considering that we could be very exhausted from the altitude and need to have some extra comfort. It feels good! Indeed we are so tired that we manage to sleep something like 15 hours the first day and 12 the second. The air is definitely thin, and even cheering for Juventus during the match with Roma (4-0) feels really breathtaking!

The city center is relatively small, and feature only the cathedral as main sight around Plaza de Armas.

A short walk down to the lake bring us to the boats to the floating islands of the Uros people. For the small amount of 10 soles we get a round trip. The lake looks kind of shallow and the boat moving very slowly for about 30 minutes when we reach the fist small island made of straw.

One of the main dishes around Titicaca is the trout which we cannot miss and it is indeed delicious, just grilled or in a lemon sauce.

The Lake Titicaca is shared between Peru and Bolivia. The border with Bolivia is indeed just few hours away from Puno, and a lot of people travel back and forth every day to get (smuggle) cheap (or cheaper) goods and gasoline. We are told that most of this will then be resold illegally all over Peru, without any taxation being involved. Well, it’s not a surprise I guess, so we at least need to go and check out how cheap the Bolivian capital really is: we have got bus tickets to La Paz!