Puno: Folklore Capital of Peru
We spent a few days before and after the islands trip in Puno, a dusty city at one end of Lake Titicaca. Since it’s at such a high elevation, the sun is strong during the day and it’s cold at night. We both bought sweaters to keep ourselves warmer (as our hostal had no heat). Puno’s not a very pretty town but the view of the lake is nice. It rained hard every night (one night it actually hailed for a solid half hour).
The food’s decent enough, we ended up eating at a Hare Krishna place a lot (Govinda, sl.5 lunch) and el Buho (not the one on calle Lima, it’s just down the corner) which had an adobe wood fired oven and they made thin crust pizza, calzones and had a delicious garlic dipping sauce. We went to the Coca Museum, which was interesting to learn about how medicinal coca leaves are (i’m amazed that chewing the leaves is really GOOD for your teeth..it prevents cavities, unlike tobacco).
We tried to time our trip to include Candelaria (feb.2) but it was not as exciting as we thought. Apparently the really cool parade with crazy costumes and masks is on Feb. 10. On Friday night we went and saw some random, unsafe fireworks and a parade in the streets with a Canadian/Belgian couple we met. Saturday morning we tried to go to the special mass but we missed it (the tourist office told us 9am..but it was 8am and we got to see a statue of Mary leaving the church and going for a walk). Sunday was the big folklore dance competition in the stadium and that was interesting. The groups all kinda had the same music (single drumbeats, trumpets, panpipes somehow out of tune). The danced in formations and the costumes were interesting. We didn’t really understand the meaning of the dances or costumes so we felt a bit lost…but it was interesting at least.