Amantani

After a four hour boat ride from puno, we arrived at the island of amantani. There are no hotels on the island, so the only place to stay is with a family. Each family has an extra room and shares having guests within their community. It was a wonderful system, because it kept the communities developing equally from the incoming cash, and didn’t allow for any large scale development projects in form of ugly large hotels. The family that we stayed with were wonderful. They we about our age, with a super cute and happy little baby boy named kleebear. They prepared us delicious traditional meals and introduced us to some of the native herbs, such as moonya, which is a wonderful mint like plant used for teas. It was probably the most authentic experience we had in peru in terms of seeing how rural Peruvians live.
The island itself was like heaven. There were no cars or roads, which was a great change of pace, so the only way to get around the island was to walk the cobble stone paths that connected the ten communities of the island. The entire island was terraced by incans over the past thousand years and was covered in gorgeous gardens and flowers. The landscape was super rocky, with two major mountains at either end of the island. The first mountain was dedicated to pachamama(mother earth) and the other to papamama(father earth). The people of the island were super friendly and wore traditional dress which was great for photographs.
The day after we arrived there happened to be another island wide festival that involved amazingly elaborate and colorful costumes, dancing, and very quiet music. Hundreds of local people showed up around the central plaza parading in one community at time, each having a special dance they prepared for the island wide dance contest that took up most the afternoon. When we got too hot we went down to lake Titicaca and dipped in the ice fresh waters and walked back to our families abode to watch another spectacular afternoon storm roll dramatically across the lake.