Tonight is our last night in Peru! Most people come to Puno to see the Uros Islands, also known as the floating islands of lake titicaca. The Uros people originally started building and living on these islands completely made of reeds before the Incas were around and did so for safety reasons. In more recent years the Uros people actually moved the islands to escape the Shining Path, a Communist revolutionary movement in Peru.
For our last night in Peru we decided to stay the night on one of these floating Islands. Tour agencies here offer overnight trips where you visit the islands during the day, but then stay overnight on a boring old normal island (and also dress up and dance which sounded horribly touristy to us). Luckily I found some info online and got our hostel to book an overnight stay directly on one of the floating islands instead.
We were picked up around midday in a small motor boat and taken to our floating reed home for the next 22 hours. On our island there wasn’t really all that much to actually do. There was a restaurant, some cabins, a toilet, a store, several other buildings selling handicrafts, a few buildings where the family lived and cooked meals, a floating chicken coop, a fish farm, two cats, the only floating post office in the world (apparently) and a small lookout tower. We paddled around the islands and reed roads for about an hour in an extremely old rickety row boat, but had to return after about an hour because in the evening a big storm blew in. We were hoping to do some fishing but all fishing around the islands is done with nets so the rest of our time on the island we spent chilling out, playing cards and relaxing which was well needed at this point.
This is a photo of the floating chicken coop out the back of the island and a out of commission row boat (ours wasn’t much better).
