Tips 👏
- It’s a pretty city on the shore of the Titicaca Lake.
- Not super big, but big enough to find everything you need in the centre.
🏠 Accommodation
We slept at the Sol Plaza Hotel and it was very good. High-end rooms, very central, super clean and very good breakfast.
🚲 Getting there
Bus of 2 hours from Bolivia, see more details in the commute section of Copacabana.
⏱ Duration
We stayed two nights and felt that was enough.
Puno City 🚶
We got to Puno for the lake, and the geographic location from Bolivia. It’s also a nice city where we decided to take a day off of our trip.
We spent most of the time in our lovely hotel, but also took a chance to visit the Plaza de Armas, run some errands and enjoy relatively cheap food in the centre. Don’t expect anything outstanding, but it’s a nice city to do a break and rest for a bit.
Uros and Taquile Island 🏝
The main attraction in Puno, besides commuting from/to Bolivia, is the Titicaca Lake, the highest navigable lake in the world (whatever that means). It’s so big that it look like the sea and you completely forget you’re at 3800m altitude (your heart don’t forget, believe us).
We’ve opted for a day tour on the lake to visit the Uros Floating Islands and Taquile Island, with Kollasuyo Travel for 30$ each with lunch. They also propose the same tour for 20$ on a slow boat, which is obviously longer for the same thing.
We got picked-up at 7AM at our hotel, and drove to the pier. We then boarded our comfy speed boat, and started a 30 minutes journey to the Uros. During the trip, the guide explained all the stuff you need to know about this place, in English and Spanish, score!
Upon arrival, we dis-embarked on one of the floating island for about 1h30. It’s naturally floating, formed by long plants, on which a community still live. The guide showed us, by us I mean our group of 25 people, how they build their houses, and explained us whatever we bought from them will help their community. After spending 20S in useless souvenirs, we’ve headed to the main floating island with a local boat to grab a coffee, get our passport stamped and leave the area. Very touristic experience but worth to see those big island-house floating around.
We then started the second part of our journey on the speed-boat for 1h20 to the beautiful Taquile island. On arrival, we hiked 2km going up to the main square of the island at its top. The hike is a bit steep but ok, and the view from the top is splendid and worth the effort. We then went down on the other side, stopped for a fresh cooked lunch during what we learned about the wedding traditions of the local communities and the textile industry. Don’t expect anything crazy, but hiking on an island in the middle of a lake at almost 4000m is quite exceptional.
That marked the end of our tour, and after another 1h30 of speed boat we arrived back at the Puno pier where we got transferred to our hotel in the centre.
Restaurants 🍲
- Casa Del Corregidor: In a very nice old building, affordable and various food, from empanadas to pasta pesto!
Read Next ⏭️
Our 3 days stay in Colca Canyon, or go back to the main Peru post.