14 August: Sibayo to Puno

I had an absolutely awesome morning in our home-stay. We sat and had breakfast with our house-mamma (breakfast was friend egg and chips, I even got some cheese with mine ... she'd wanted to give us rice with our breakfast as well!). During breakfast we managed to chat to our house-mamma about all sorts of things using hand signals (to show how old we all were) and some very basic Spanish (mine has definitely improved during this trip!).

The Ageing Aunt had brought some photos from home (apparently we were all supposed to, but trust her to be the only one who'd remembered!), which we showed our mamma and I showed her a few on my Blackberry. And then she even brought out her own photo album to show us, which was really interesting!

Then we left Sibayo and started our long day on the bus. We did stop for a 45min walk to see some rock carvings, which was awesome! Other than that the rest of the day was pretty much spent driving. We did stop to see a few flamingo on the way as well, where we found ourselves all quite out of breathe walking around at around 4500m above sea-level. A little nervous again now for the The Lares Trek because the highest point on that is about 4800m!



We arrived in Puno at about 15h30 and had an hour at our hotel, Munay Tambo, to shower and relax before we headed off to the local market to buy another round of gifts for our next home-stay. After that we went for dinner (spot the tourist restaurants with their English translated menus!). I had a very nice pizza (apparently Puno makes the best pizzas in Peru and there are certainly enough pizzeria's around!).

By the time we were done, it was only 20h30 so @UselessRob and I went to a little bar called Positive for a drink. It was very cool, with all sorts of messages written on the wall. I drew my gladtobeagirl logo and wrote the url - hahaha!

We got back to the hotel around 10pm (I was feeling a bit weird, I assume all altitude related because I've had a few light-headed spells since arriving in Puno) and the whole place was locked up! Noticing a trend here. We tried ringing the doorbell (let's keep in mind that this hotel reception is an entire courtyard away from the wooden door we were stuck outside, so yelling was not helpful) but, it didn't seem to help! Luckily had his phone and our tour leader's number, so he called her to tell her we were stuck outside. Turns out the damn doorbell wasn't actually switched on :P How mad. Anyway, at least we didn't have to spend the night on the streets of Puno ;) Haha.

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