At eight in the morning, workme started hammering away, awaking me from my pleasant slumber. Why is it that nowhere in the world, builders seem to do any work, apart from where I am sleeping?

I had breakfast and walked to the port. The man there said the tour to the floating islands, where the Uros live, was 20 soles, I said I'd read it was more like 10, he told me I could go for 15. Perhaps I am getting the hang of this bargaining malarky...

On the boat, I ran into Nikki and Troy again, the two Australians from Adelaide. A few minutes into the trip, the boat stalled. As most of us had been travelling South America for a while, we had to laugh, as it's such a cliche that any Bolivian or Peruvian vehicle you board will prove to have some kind of failure at one point.

Neither the brand new captain, nor Enrique the guide ('Like Enrique Iglesias') managed to get the boat going again, so he had to call the old captain on his mobile. In the meantime, the yourng woman was steering and we were going dangerously off course. Women drivers eh? The old captain came in another boat and got her going straightaway, telling Enrique the boat was 'capriciosa', temperamental.

After a while, with no further incident, we arrived at the first Uros island, where Enrique made us eat some of the totora reed, the same stuff the Uros make their islands, their houses and their boats with. It's rich in iodine and supposedly is good against rheumatism, good for the sex drive and it gives the people a darker complexion than the people in Puno. The kids chew it all the time, like a snack.

Although Enrique had said the Uros are easy about photos (well, the ones allowing us on the islands in the first place anyway) and don't ask money, as long as you ask permission, the first lady I asked (she was grinding grains to make bread) had her little cup ready for any donations...

This is what I remember from Enriques explanations: the Uros seemed to be quite unwanted: at first they were forced to mix with the Aymaras (not sure how but OK) which is why they now speak Aymara rather than their own language. It seems the Shining Path weren't too fond of them either. In the end, they figured they could avoid persecution by moving out, and started building their floating islands in the bay across from Puno.

On one island you can have up to ten families. Making a reed boat takes about 1.5 year and it is communal property. Nowadays, the boats have empty plastic bottles in the middle (Coca Cola no doubt) to make them float better and make them more durable.

They can cut their islands loose from their ankers and move if they have a quarrel with their neighbours. In fact, in very bad weather, they may wake up a couple of 100 metres from where their island originally was, if the ankers crack.

They have a representative on each island, male or female, who goes to the meetings and makes decisions that concern the community. The representatives change every year. But the Uros are mainly a man-dominated society: the woman, when she marries at about 15-16, will usually move to her new husband's island, otherwise they may say he's 'pisado', under the thumb. The marriage feast has to have Cusqueña, which is the most expensive beer and thus a status symbol.

We visited three islands, which all had more or less the same souvenir shops, and took a trip on a reed boat, very touristy, but fun nonetheless. Our boat found the way back OK and the bus dropped us off in the centre. I had lunch with Trevor and Colin, two slightly more mature men (in their fourties) from Northern Ireland and then went shopping.

I managed to negotiate a few soles less at most places, but not that much. After, I sat myself down by the cathedral and Alan and Andres, two shoeshine boys, cornered me. They were very talkative and amusing, in fact I'm thinking that may be in the job description because Samuel, from Sucre, was the same.

Andres: 'If you continue to walk around with shoes that dirty, everyone will keep harrassing you'.
Alan: 'Don't worry, I'm a professional'.
I figured Andres had a point, I have certainly had a lot of shoeshine boy attention with my dirty boots, so I said OK. They were very thorough, taking one foot each, spending about ten minutes on them! In the end they looked good as new, and Alan tried to get 5 soles out of me. I was impressed though, with them getting two months of mud off, so I gave them a sole each.

In the meantime, señora Rosa Mollenido Moncada, a chola of about 50, had tried to sell me the entire contents of her bag, knowing that I couldn't move. I kept telling her no, and she kept trying and in the end we just both started laughing. Even the lady next to us, another chola, had to laugh. We all started talking, mostly them asking me questions, especially why I was travelling alone.

Rosa told me she was from a small pueblo called Juli, where they had a small collective of women making artesanias ('Are you sure you don't want presents for your mum, your family?' 'No thank you, I have bought too much already')
Her 26 year old daughter was studying IT in Tacna. ('Was I going to Tacna? She would be waiting for me at the station'. With more artesanias no doubt...) Rosa wanted me to write her name down, she wrote it in curly letters on her hand and told me to copy it in my diary.

I figured if I wanted any time to write in my diary without being interrupted every two minutes, I'd better go to a cafe, which I did. In the evening I had a lovely dinner with salad and 'trucha' (trout), but I'm going to have to watch my budget because Peru is turning out to be more expensive than Bolivia.

The bus to Cuzco leaves at 8 tomorrow from the bus station, so early to bed for me...