Day 82 - An audience with the President

Puno

We booked what we thought was a ferry trip to the floating islands of Uros, which are islands in Lake Titicaca constructed entirely of reeds that the villagers live on.  We had hoped to be able to wander around for a while and catch a ferry back whenever we wanted.

From a distance the area of the floating islands covered quite an area. We landed on quite a small island which consisted of half a dozen little reed huts and many souvenir stalls. We were then required to listen to a talk in Spanish from the island's "president", though it seemed he only presided over his wife and a few old people manning the souvenir stalls. Amongst the information he gave in the talk there was a heavy focus on money. We were told we should financially support the islanders and their children (even though it seemed no-one actually lived on the island we were on), it seemed like a scam. They were even selling stuffed ducks .... no way we'd ever get one of those through customs!

All hail the president!

However we fell for the scam even further when we were offered the choice of paying to go the "capital" (a larger island about 100 metres away) or staying where we were for the next hour and a half until the others returned. Against our better judgement we paid for the boat trip (we didn't have much else to do and we felt like we were trapped), which was on a reed boat, moved by pushing it with another boat with an outboard motor, which was driven by the "president" (so I guess that makes him a "captain" as well). Along the way we passed many empty islands very similar to the one we visited - each probably with their very own "president". The "capital" was a larger version of the first island, but this one has more souvenir stalls as well as a couple of restaurants. After a few minutes we then saw that the people from our group who hadn't paid for the trip to the capital were also on the island, they'd come across on the original ferry for nothing!

By this stage we'd had enough, and sneaked on to a boat that was leaving earlier and headed back to town.

We could have (and should have) visited other islands from Puno (such as Taquile Island), but we only had one full day in Puno. We had heard that the floating islands were "a bit touristy" but never expected it to be as poor as it turned out to be!

She's a beauty, ain't she? Top speed about 5km/h!