Cusco - Puno: High Altitude Training

After a longer period without real internet connection, we are now able to update the blog again, so what has happened?

Firstly, when we visited Huchuy Qosqo we took also some pictures, here an example

The last day in Cusco we visited the Chocolate Museum (small but very nice) and we found an interesting figure: according to estimations, about 90 % of the Coca leaf production is not used for tea and other legal products but is used "otherwhise"  ;-) We wonder what this might be :-D But besides Coca, Cacao seems to be a fairly good alternative to get money, Switzerland is one of the top buyer from Peruvian Cacao and Swiss eat about 11.7 kg Chocolate per year...
In the afternoon we attended the City tour of Cusco, but we were not really happy with it: It was a mainstream show of sights around Cusco (the sights are awesome) where a lot of tourists in many small buses get carried to the places where the Peruvian ladies wait and try to sell "stuff" ("baby alpaca pullover's, gloves, lockets and MANY other things"), the tourguide gives a 5 min speak about what this is, you have 5 more minutes to walk around and take pictures, back to the bus to the next stop and finally you end up in a Alpaca Store for 30 minutes where you can buy more alpaca stuff... the funniest thing with this is: it works! at least 4 from our group did really buy something there.... :-) good business I guess for the sellers...

Cusco City - Not the Cathedral ;-)

Sacsayhuaman

So we decided to have an great dinner in the evening, but the restaurant we wanted to go was already full, so we went to the same one as we did the last time in Jan and had a very tasty piece of meat.

Well, what else...? oh, right I went to the barber to get rid of my beard :-) nice experience but I'm not posting a picture how I looked afterwards, just while he was doing his work ...

So we were ready to take the bus to Puno (actually we wanted to take the train, but a train ticket that cost's 220US Dollars per person was though a little expensive, so we took the 50 Soles bus instead). On the way to Puno we've seen a lot of different special things (old VW Beetle's, little remote villages, the train to Puno, road construction sites and many things more... ) and we arrived in the evening in Puno (a touristy city at the lago Titicaca).

Puno at Sunset

We had 2 options in mind, going to the Islas Taquile or visiting Sillustani, but apparently all tour opperators that visit the island stop at the "human zoo", the floating islands of the Uros... and since we didn't want to go with a tour like that, we decided to catch a cab in the morning that drives us out to the ancient tombs-hill of Sillustani. 
It's actually a really nice place and you don't need to come by a tour bus, since some of the statements that the guides said was just wrong! So we spent a day on this peninsula before we took a collectivo (8 people in a car) back to the main road and then a small bus back to Puno.

Sillustani

From Puno, we organized a tour to Chivay, the village with hot thermal baths and the entrance to the Colca Canon (where you have to buy a tourist ticket for 35 Soles, just to be there). We took a tour that stops at some places for pictures and you have a guide telling you some stories about this area (pretty good, although we declined the offer to try alpaca meat at 08.00 in the morning at a trucker restaurant).
At lunch we arrived in Chivay and after some food, we went to the "high altitude rescue team" in Chivay (similar to the REGA in Switzerland) where we asked for hiking information about the Colca Canon. One of the gave us willingly information and the other guy kept watching TV (what a cool job!) and we took a local bus to Cabanaconde (3287 m) where we spent the night in a Backpacker hostal (12 Soles per person, incl. breakfast) and where we got ready for our tour through the Canon... but this is in the next blog entry...