Wow its been two weeks since I last posted anything. So without further ado

Our last stop in Peru was a small town called Puno on the edge of Lake Titicaca. The coolest thing we got up to was a little boat ride out to the floating islands on the lake. The story goes that the Uros were quite peaceful and they were getting a whole lot of grief from the other folks around the place so they decided to make themselves some islands out of reeds and hang out in the middle of the lake. And it seemed to work since some of them are still there, and happily making a decent trade off all the tourists. The islands themselves are quite squishy and get refreshed seasonally as the bottom layer rots away they just gather up some reeds, and throw them down on top. Some of the trickier guys have little trout ponds and vege gardens built-in.

We also visited a really old burial ground called Sillustani, which was fairly impressive. For several hundred years local big wigs were buried in large cylindrical stone tombs (chullpas) sitting on a hill above another lake. All the chullpas were in various states of repair but the 12m tall big daddy was still intact enough to be suitably impressive. As we escaped the approaching thunderstorm in our tour bus we got stuck in another carnival as the local villagers turned out in droves all dressed in their fanciest and brightest clothes, to alternately dance, play music and shoot foam at one another and any tourists foolish enough to be caught in the crossfire.

Bolivia was another overnight bus ride away, and garnered us our first walk over an international border. We were pretty tired by the time we arrived in La Paz, but the view of the city as we came in from the high plains and swooped around the motorway above the valley containing the city perked us up. Unfortunately this was fairly short lived as at almost 3700m, and with so many steep streets up and down the valley, Oxygen was continually in short supply.

We found a quiet hotel in an area known as the witches market where a whole bunch of middle-aged ladies (and one bloke in a soccer shirt) trade in exotic teas and lucky dried llama fetuses. Not as worrying as it sounds we got to explore a fair bit, and visited a string of small museums, the most interesting of which was the Coca Museum. Having been exposed to the concept that Coca is just the stuff that the nuns try to sell you so you can have some tea or the stuff that the old mountain folk chew (kind of like tobacco but without the ill effects) to combat exhaustion and altitude sickness. The museum reinforces the point that Coca only became a problem for the South Americans once whitey started abusing it.

We also took a really long public bus ride down the valley to the local badlands (yup that's a technical term) known as the Valley of the Moon. As soon as we stepped from the bus there was a thunderclap and we rushed right inside the startled ticket guys booth. The area itself is a chronically eroded patch of earth and stone with classic boulder perched on pinnacle of earth next to treacherous sinkhole geography straight out of a roadrunner cartoon, and made for a very diverting afternoon of wandering from one rain shelter to the next (and complaining about the lack of Oxygen).