On Friday night, I left on a 9:30pm bus for the city of Puno, on the coast of Lake Titicaca. The bus trip took about 7 hours, and we got to Puno about 4am. The bus itself was not the most comfortable of transportation, some sort of double decker behemouth packed to capacity, traveling through the Andean countryside. So needless to say, I didn´t get too much sleep. Got to the hotel we were staying at, and to my dismay, the parades started at 5am. Marching bands continued to pass directly by the hotel for the next 3 hours. By the time I finally decided to give it up and go downstairs for breakfast, the streets were silent. (I´ll add some pictures in a couple days)

At breakfast I met a a guy from France and his girlfriend form England, who were 3 months into a 10 month trip from Argentina to California...on a bicycle built for two. Pretty impressive.

I had come to Puno with Silvia and Julio and their family, so I would be hanging out with them and friends of their kids. On Friday, we went out to the countryside near Puno, where we looked around an alpaca and cow farm. Sort of a cool old style farm house and alpaca shearing operation. We ate a sort of a picnic lunch there, and then we traveled to an Inca burial ground bordering lake Titicaca. It basically consisted of a bunch of big round stone monoliths, used presumably as tombs for the dead.

After a good old rotiserie chicken dinner, I went with some friends to check out the parade route, where groups were dancing, without their full costume, as practice for the big festival on sunday and monday. Despite the rain and cold, they were all out there dancing and playing music anyway. Someone found some cans of that artificial snow, and we all found ourselves thouroughly saturated with it after a while. We went to a nearby bay to warm up and talk a bit, all 15 of us, covered in weird white stuff. I met an interesting guy from Vancouver, who has a remarkable amount of similar interests, and has done some crazy stuff and worked all over the world, it was pretty cool to talk to him for awhile. I was told later that everyone thought I looked like him 15 years younger.