August 3, 2007: First Day in Puno
Saturday, August 11th, 2007Kitty and I arrived at the Juliaca airport around 8:30 am. As in Cuzco, a Peruvian band was playing music at the baggage carrousel. I ended up buying a CD.
A driver wearing a jacket with the Hotel Libertador logo picked us up for the hour-long drive to Puno, the main town on Lake Titicaca and the town we’d be having our conference in. I found out later that the driver’s name was Percy, a decidedly non-Spanish name. He was named after a soccer player his father adored. He had been a professor at the University de Altiplano (University of the Highlands), but his contract hadn’t been renewed. I asked Marcela if the phrases “office politics” and “they have their heads stuck up their asses” can be translated directly into Spanish; they can.
Once we passed through the arid countryside, over a hill, and into and through the town of Puno, I could see a white building loosely shaped like a ship sitting on a small island on the lake. This was the Hotel Libertador.
We checked in and were given welcome cups of mate de coca (coca tea), said to help with the headaches and loss of energy associated with altitude sickness. I went to my room. It had a mini bar, plush bathrobes, slippers, and toiletries that indicated it was a high-end, luxury hotel like any other in the world. But looking carefully in the bathroom, I saw a sign that was uniquely Peruvian: a picture of someone throwing paper into the toilet with a red circle around it and a red line through it. Kitty said that at that altitude, there isn’t enough water pressure to pull the paper down and through the pipes. I understood, but to be blunt it took a while to override 30-some years of potty training.
I looked at the view of Lake Titicaca out my window, and was again surprised to see that it looked more like a bay with algae floating in it than a great lake. Still, the view of the water surrounded by the red hills and houses of the town was pretty, as was the view of alpaca chomping on the grass in the front drive.
I skipped lunch because I was told that one should eat light when arriving in a high-altitude area to avoid altitude sickness. (When I write about the previous week’s trip to Cuzco, I’ll talk about my experience with altitude sickness. After that it will be clear why I was trying so hard to avoid it again).
Marcela, Kitty’s assistant who had arrived in Puno the night before and who had been at the conference all morning, came back to the hotel after lunch to fetch me and the CD player for the conference. We went downtown to Hotel Ferrocarril (Railway Hotel), a lovely old building with orange-cream colored walls, black-and-white or wooden floors, and a switchboard with cable switches.
I had two presentations that afternoon that went well. In the evening there was a reception at the same hotel hosted by the Cultural, a binational center (BNC) that provides language training in centers throughout Peru (and, I believe, much of Central and South America). A band played Peruvian and Bolivian music for the participants from the two countries while waiters brought trays of bocaditos (hors d’oeuvres) and cocktails to the people sitting in white linen chairs surrounding the perimeter of a large wooden dance floor. I got to try Huajsapata, a local cocktail made of a kind of warm fruit punch spiked with pisco, the national liquor. I imagine they prefer warm drinks in Puno because of it can go below freezing at night in the winter. Later, people got up to dance but I declined.
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