Bus from Cusco to Puno
After a very short night's sleep last night, I managed to pull myself out of bed at about 8am this morning, to check out of Hospedaje El Artesano for the last time, and to meet Chris at the Cusco central bus terminal at 10am. It felt really good to have my big bag on my shoulders, and to be back on the road again; but I couldn't believe that I was actually leaving Cusco after all this time (almost 8 weeks!), and that I was once again free of work and study commitments. But I guess I'll get used to it.
Chris and I travelled to Puno together today; and we're probably going to continue travelling together, for at least the next week. We didn't have a bus ticket to Puno, when we arrived at the station this morning; but I'd done a bit of research on the weekend (in the way of paying a visit to the bus station), and I discovered that since there are about 20 different companies, offering services to Puno all day and every day, it wouldn't be a problem buying a ticket on the spot. And indeed it wasn't. It took about 5 minutes, and s/20 each, and we were on the 10:30am bus to Puno.
The trip from Cusco to Puno was largely uneventful. 6-7 hours, on a fairly straight, flat, sealed road. And because I only got about 4 hours of sleep last night, I dozed for most of the way.
However, for the periods when I was awake, it was very interesting to observe the change in scenery around us. Since I've been in the Cusco area for so long, I've kind of gotten used to seeing nothing but mountains wherever I go. I've pretty much forgotten what flat land looks like. But as we headed south towards Puno, the landscape rapidly changed from the beautiful, tall, rugged, lush mountains of the Peruvian Andes that I've come to know and love, to the endless, flat, dry, dusty expanse of the Bolivian altiplano (high plains). And instead of farms and villages hugging sheer mountainsides at impossible angles, there were just dirty fields and ramshackle houses, spread higgledy-piggledy through the plains in all directions.
About an hour before we reached Puno, we passed through its big and ugly nearby sister, the city of Juliaca. When you pass through Juliaca, you can see why none of the tourists get off there: it looks pretty damn unappealing. It's a big, flat, ugly grid of buildings, all of which are utterly devoid of anything resembling architecture. And it's just sitting there by itself, on the big dry altiplano, with nothing much going for it, except that a lot of locals seem to live there.
Finally, towards evening, we passed over a few small mountains; and we had our first view of the beautiful vista of Lake Titicaca, and of the town of Puno hugging its western shore. A very different view to what we saw on the road for most of the way; and definitely quite different to what we saw of Juliaca. Soon enough, we made it into town, and stepped off the bus to take in a whiff of that cold but refreshing lakeside air.