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.
