After leaving Puno with our best tour guide of the whole tour, we traveled on some really bad roads including one section that was reduced to one lane because of rocks the striking teachers had put there. The rocks were small enough to be easily moved (my guess 20-100 lbs at the most) but they hadn't been and they looked like they had been there a while hampering traffic. Strange. Anyway our guide was great in that he answered all our questions that we had stored up - so a lot of the Peruvian history and tidbits you have read about in these blogs were from him. After about an hour of bouncing around the road we arrived at another part of Lake Titicaca where there were some burials towers along with souvenir stands and "pay-to-take-my-picture" children.
Side note: Most people here are so poor you really didn't mind giving them money for a photo and buying alpaca hats that you will probably keep in a drawer for the rest of your life.
The tower above was a tomb. They buried their dead in a squat position and in a inverted cone shaped container. The size of the outside tower depended on their rank. The towers were more examples their spectacular stonework. The circular depressions in the outer stones were filled with a ball of cement-like stuff to hold it together. (Remember this is an area that has a lot of earthquakes as you probably read about- It is amazing that so many of the Inca structures survived). Clever!
