Peru - Monday 26 October 1998
We are getting up (reasonably) early again. We're heading to the Cusco station. Today, we will spend the whole day on the train to Puno.
A beautiful route: right through the Andes mountains. Constantly changing landscapes, even though it's mostly yellow grassland. Everywhere, you see villages and people working in the fields. Sometimes, we literally stop at a hollow tree.
There's a lot of trading on the train, in practically everything: food and drinks, film rolls, cigarettes, and especially a lot of textiles. Woolen socks, hats, gloves, and a lot of sweaters. I buy one for 20 soles (approximately 15 Dutch guilders).
Femke gives me a motion sickness pill. That train shakes so much!! Along the way, we entertain ourselves. Play some card games, we teach the non-Dutch people in the group the game "bullying". Turns out, it's played with different rules in Belgium...
We get off at Juliaca, a small town north of Puno. It's clearly a poor town but cozy. The train stops right in the middle of the market. It's a mess on the street again.
We get off here because, according to Patricia, it saves us 1.5 hours. From Juliaca, it's only a 20-minute drive to Puno by minibus.
Our group is temporarily expanded with an Australian, a Scot, an Englishman, and two women whose origins I don't know. It's customary at Tucan Travel to occasionally combine groups on overlapping routes. This group is on a one-week trip from Lima, through Cusco to Bolivia. They are all a lot older than us and have completely different interests. We socialize with them, but otherwise, we find it a rather vague group.
For this occasion, I'm sharing a room with the Australian. He's quite nice. Quite funny, he's a TV salesman, and I'm a TV journalist. So, we help each other out...
In a little restaurant, we get an explanation in the evening about our trip to Lake Titicaca and the island of Taquile, tomorrow.
