The Inca Express from Cuzco to Puno took almost ten hours. I enjoyed the ride but it killed me to sit for so long. I was met at the bus depot by another guide and taken to my hotel. I checked in, ate a quick meal and went up to my room to try to recover. I had the next day off to rest. I did everything I could to try to feel better including a long shower and taking some anti-inflammatories along with morphine. Then I took a sleeping pill to knock me out. I made sure I drank a lot of water and coca tea too because at 12,400 feet it is easy to get dehydrated. I wondered how the sleeping pill would react with all the coca tea I was drinking but there did not seem to be any difference to other times I had taken it. I slept well and felt better in the morning.
My guide met me at my hotel right after breakfast and we walked around town for a personal city tour. You guessed it again, we went to the main square and the cathedral. I told my guide I wanted to see more local people and how they live instead of more cathedrals. So she took me to the market place. We walked around and she told me what everything was that I did not already recognize. There were some weird fruits and things that I did not know. She then took me to a little stall where we ate some very tasty tamales and tortas. She wanted to drive me around town but I told her I would rather have the day off to rest. The next morning I was scheduled to go to Lake Titicaca to see the floating islands. She understood and we split up.
I slowly wandered around town in the direction of my hotel. I stopped to watch some of the locals doing things like making up a huge pot of soup. The woman making it was entertained that I was watching her. I started to talk to her and she was very friendly. When she was finished loading up the pot and she let it start to simmer I told her thanks for letting me watch and went on my way. Then I watched an old lady selling some fruit on the street corner. She was trying very hard but was not selling anything. I stopped to talk to her. She was very poor and homeless. She had begged the fruits off a farmer to try to sell to make some money to eat with. I had no idea what it was she was selling but I bought some and then just gave it away later to someone else. It was a bag of greens of some type. I kept walking and found a man cleaning some fish. He was working very slowly but doing a good job filleting the small fish. I asked him where the fish came from and he told me from Lake Titicaca. They were nice sized rainbow trout. I told him that the fish he was cleaning were originally from my home town in California. Rainbow trout were first found in Strawberry Creek in Berkeley California and have been transplanted to almost fifty counties on all continents except Antarctica since then. He looked at me like I was crazy when I told him that. Then we talked about what fish were in the lake. The only problem was he kept using local names for the fish and I had no idea what those names referred to. He only had the trout to show me. I kept walking after we finished talking. I stopped in a little cafe near a busy corner and sat down to drink a beer or two while I watched the world walk by.
I met a woman sitting there and we started to talk. She was twenty five years old and still single, She told me that it was unusual to be single at 25 but she had gone to university and she was almost finished with her school. She was going to school to be a tour guide she told me. The program is seven years long and you must graduate from it to get a permit to be a tour guide. She spoke English well and wanted to practice speaking with me. Sure I will help a nice young woman learn how to speak English. We talked for almost two hours and I told her I had to get back to my hotel to eat dinner and get some rest. I told her she could come with me if she wanted to. To my surprise she took me up on my offer. We walked back to my hotel with her practicing her tour guide skills along the way. We had some dinner and went up to my room. I wanted to take a shower and I told her she could watch tv or something to entertain herself while I took my shower. She sat down and turned on the tube. I jumped into the shower and to my surprise a couple of minutes later she knocked on my shower door and joined me in the shower. We conserved some water by showering together and then hit the sack.
We played around for a while and then she wanted me to roll on top so I did. I started to have some energetic fun and was going at it full bore when all of a sudden I felt like I was choking. I stopped moving and felt like I was going to die right there on top of her. I wasn't sure if I was having a heart attack or something like that. I started glupping huge breaths of the thin air but still felt like I was suffocating. I rolled over on my back and tried to catch my breath. We were at 12,700 feet in elevation and despite all my coca tea I just ran out of steam due to my physical exertion. I gasped for a couple of minutes and then slowly got my wind back. I looked over at my girlfriend and she started to laugh. I had to start laughing too. A few minutes later I was recovered and after laughing about it for a while, we continued at a much slower pace, I had learned my lesson. She told me she knew I was going at it too energetically. She could have warned me or something. It was a fun evening with her. She went home early and I went to bed alone to rest up for the morning trip out to Lake Titicaca. She was a pleasant surprise ending to my day so far.
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