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The ladies
Local farm
San Juan Bautista Church
Floating Islandsnight bus nightmares
The marketplace is the best part of Puno. It's not overly touristic, very colorful and great cheap fun just walking around it. Lots of great street food for the adventurous too. The Cuzco to Puno night bus had a particularly bad reputation for theft, but the day bus arrived at an inconvenient time so we opted for the night run. We arrived at the terminal around 11 PM and anxiously boarded the dilapidated bus. Since we had expected the worst, the general appearance of the bus didn’t bother us much, but the small seats did. Peruvians are small in stature in general so the leg room is beyond tight for the average North American or Northern European. We crammed ourselves into our seats along with the hoard of locals and their assorted livestock. On a previous night bus, we had been overly warm so were ill prepared for the nippy conditions we now encountered. This certainly didn’t bother the indigenous locals, as they seemed to carry everything they owned with them and hence had an ample supply of blankets on hand. The driver had been driving like mad and it had been difficult to get much sleep with his taking curves at dangerous speeds that resulted in our being jostled from side to side all night. At one of the last stops, it seemed he didn’t want to go into town to drop a group of Quechua women off at the terminal. It was our first glimpse of the mysterious man behind the curtain who had driven so recklessly all evening. He looked a frantic figure, lanky for Peruvian, with a huge wool hat on and bulging eyes peering from underneath it. He yelled maniacally at the women, who in turn yelled back just as feverously. Of course, we found the whole thing amusing and didn’t quite know what all the fuss was about. Finally, he succumbed, as was a good idea with that many women in an uproar. He drove even more crazily bringing them to the terminal and barely waited for them to make it down the bus steps before flying off through the deserted streets of the small village. (concluded below in Fondest Memory)
