The city of Puno is located in the south east corner of
Peru, on the shores of the magnificent Lake Titicaca and only 126km from the
frontier with Bolivia.
At 3,827m in altitude, Puno is a rather cold and bleak town surrounded by
the desolate altiplano (or high plateau).
Lake Titicaca is the world's highest navigable lake and the center of a
region where thousands of subsistence farmers eke out a living fishing in
its icy waters, growing potatoes in the rocky land at its edge or herding
llama and alpaca at altitudes that leave Europeans and North Americans
gasping for air. It is also where traces of the rich Indian past still
stubbornly cling, resisting in past centuries the Spanish conquistadors'
aggressive campaign to erase Inca and pre Inca cultures and, in recent
times, the lure of modernization.
When Peruvians talk of turquoise blue Titacaca, they proudly note that it is
so large it has waves. This, the most sacred body of water in the Inca
empire and now the natural separation between Peru and Bolivia, has a
surface area exceeding 8,000 square kilometers (3,100 square miles), not
counting its more than 30 islands.