titicaca lake tours - tours in puno and titicaca lake
Amantani
Handicrafts also play an important role in life on Amantani, a lovely and peaceful island even further away from Puno than Taquile. Amantani was once part of the Inca empire, as attested to by local ruins, before the Spanish invaded and slaughtered the islanders. The Spaniard who was granted a concession to the island used the Indians in forced labor and his descendants were still in control after Peru's independence from Spain. But eventually an island fiesta turned violent and the Indians attacked their landlord with hoes and consequently split up the island into communally-held fields.
Amantani Island:
Its doors are opened to outsiders who are willing to live for a few days as the Aymará-speaking islanders do -and that means sleeping on beds made of long hard reeds and eating potatoes for every meal. There is no running water or electricity and nighttime temperatures drops to freezing even in the summer. Some Amantaní residents live and die without ever leaving the island.
Journeys to Amantaní begin at Puno docks aboard sputtering wooden motorboats operated by the islanders. At the end of the four-hour trip, visitors are registered as guests and assigned to a host family. The family, usually led by a shy patriarch, shows the way to its mud-brick home set around an open courtyard decorated with white pebbles spelling out the family's name.
Prepared visitors usually bring gifts of fruit -a rarity on the isolated island and the socializing begins when a family member who speaks English offers a guided walk around the island, from where the views are something spectacular. Women wearing traditional black and white lace dresses pass by with Slingshots in their hands to kill scavenging birds.
Esteves Island
Esteves is connected to Puno by a bridge, well known because of its luxurious hotel and it is a far cry from what was used to be the main construction on the island - a prison that accommodated the patriots captured by the Spanish during Peru's war for independence.
Chullpas de Sillustani : mysterious burial chambers
titicaca lake tours
At About 35 km (21 miles) from Puno, is located Sillustani, with its circular burial towers or chullpas overlooking Umayo lake. The age of the funeral towers, which are up to 12 meters (40 feet) high, remains a puzzle. A Spanish chronicle-keeper described them as "recently finished" in 1549, although some still appear as if they were never completed and the natives that built them were conquered by the Incas about a century earlier. The chullpas apparently were used as burial chambers for nobles of the Colla civilization; these ere antives who spoke Aymara, who buried their nobility with their entire family.
Not far away is Chucuito, a village that sits upon what was once an Inca settlement and which boasts an Inca sundial. Stop by the Santo Domingo Church with its small museum in this altiplano village; also worth visiting is La Asuncion Church.
Copacabana can also be reached by taking a minibus rid around the side of the lake, passing the reeds waving in the wind, shy but curious children at the bends in the road and always the brilliant blue of Titicaca or the roadway that ends the lake.
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recommended tours by important travel guides are: lares trek, puno and titicaca lake tours, machu picchu tours, choquequirao trek, colca canyon tours, cusco day tours, and peru tours
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