a change of plans

we awoke early this am to catch a ride to the docks to catch a boat to start our two-day tour of islands on titicaca. we met our guide in the lobby and she said "there is a transport strike starting tomorrow. is better to do sillustani excursion today and to do island visits and stay monday and tuesday." after a bit of wheeling and dealing with the hotel we got things settled. we leave in the am for Uros, Amantani, and then on tuesday we go to Taquille.

Sillustani is a cool place. The Callo people built short silo-like towers for their noble dead out of stone and mud. When the Incas came they copied these tombs, but built them out of typically exquisite enormous stones, carved into rounded and interlocking blocks. Some archeologists along the way decided to look for gold in these towers by dynamiting them, so all of them are in various states of ruin, but they still impress. There are a couple stone circles which were ritual sites to the sun and moon, and which resemble something out of Lovecraft. There is also a large boulder with a jaguar face on one side and a spiral on the other. When our tour guide put his compass next to the spiral, it went bonkers. I made a movie-it´s pretty cool.

nothing much to do in Puno. huge swaths of the city are off-limits according to lonely planet, because of attacks on tourists. our fist day here we ran into an aged Englishman who asked how long we´d been in this town. I told him ten minutes, and he said "i can´t wait to get out of here. they don´t have a bloddy place to drink a cup of coffee outside. and the cold is bone-chilling."

But all the restaurants are playing non-stop MJ.