I´M ON A BOAT! (well, a bus first, then a boat)

Since our last post, we spent a day hanging out in Arequipa nursing our altitude sickness and doing laundry at our hostel. Doing laundry included buying a giant bar of soap from the market, washing our clothes in the giant sinks on the roof (little house on the Praire status Mel!) and then hanging them to dry. All in all, a pretty sweet operation, we hope to find more sweet set ups like that one along the way. We are also very thankful for pepto bismol....we´ll leave it at that....

The next morning we hopped on a 6 hour bus ride to Puno. We totally scored these cheap seats in the back of the bus with extra storage and reclining seats...very nice! The 6 hour ride was nice, eventful with some unscheduled stops and random performances by bus passengers.. Ok, lets be real, Jo still can´t sit still at ALL! Aly would like to say ¨Thanks mom, for the long car rides growing up, they have made me a professional bus rider!¨

Upon arrival to Puno, we met up with some fellow travelers from Australia and San Fransisco that had been on the same bus as us. We shared a cab and went hostel searching. We ended up finding an awesome hostel that serves pancakes in the morning (a big selling point for us) and looks deceptively horrible from the outside. However, it´s really cute and awesome....also currently sponsoring this blog! Ambre, our cool new San Fransiscan friend came with us to the hostel.

Yesterday and today we took a boat ride to Uros and Amantani Island on Lake Titcaca. Uros Island was pretty awesome. The people make the islands themselves out of reads that grow on the lake. They call them the floating islands, because when all the reads are attached they do just chill in the water and float around! After we went to Uros, we went back on the boat for another 3 hours to Amantani Island. We were hosted by a super cute family, including a four year old that we LOVE, Ihon (Ee-o). We did spend a lot of time playing crazy games with him!

TOday, after leaving the island, we experienced some intense waves and our boat was a rockin´. The rocking was only intesified when our boat broke down for about half an hour. the waves were almost splashing us, so we decided to climb up to the top of the boat.... about 30 seconds later, we realized this was a horrible idea as the boat was rocking even harder up there. We then proceeded to army crawl across the roof and back down the ladder to safety. Some other passengers thought we were crying, but really it was cackling laughter. No cause for alarm.

We are back in Puno now, and have decided to stay one more night to go to a festival tomorrow. Apparently there is a lot of dancing in the streets... needless to say, we are pretty stoked!

On Monday, we plan to take a bus to Bolivia, and begin a whole other adventure there!

Until Next Time,

Aly and Jo

p.s. love and miss you all!