November 21, 2010

I got up at 4:45, hellbent on doing my best to catch some fish with my fishing rod and lures I had been carrying since we left Norway. The sun was just about to come up and it was incredibly cold, I would guess a couple of degress below freezing. The climate here is extreme. During the day we had around 25 C (80 F) and had to apply total sun block because of the intense sun.

I put on my long underpants and 4 layers over my torso: t-shirt, fleece sweater, alpaca wool sweater and finally my wind proof warm jacket. I was still too cold. After this clothing ritual I did my morning bladder shrinking and proceeded to put together the equipment. I put the 4 piece traveling rod together, attached the reel, got out some line and started piercing the many small rings of the rod with the line. Then I attached the thingy on the line that one attaches lures to. After that I spent some time selecting a lure before I attached it. Next I attached my net to my belt and got ready to move to the water. This is when I noticed that the handle on the reel was missing! It had unscrewed itself and fallen off. It must be lying in my backpack at the hotel in Puno!

Luckily none of the islanders had seen me doing all this. I slowly dismantled everything again while I cursed to several gods. Grumpy as only I can be I instead got my laptop out and spent a couple of hours blogging in the dining house.

The islanders were up very early and i heard music already at 04:45. Today was election day and Cristinas sister was running for mayor! A couple of the members of the greater family were going to be election helpers, helping out at a voting station.

Around 7:30 the Sloveninans were ready to go out and pull in the fishing net. Adrian joined them.

Today´s catch was 3 small fish.

After another fantastic breakfast

and some packing is was time to leave Qhantati and say goodbye to our hosts. We were overwhelmed with impressions from our 48 hours on the island and it was hard to leave. Iseline said she really, really wanted to stay one more night. As we left Adrian and Viktor each got a professional pan flute as a gift, the ones that had been used by family members. We were deeply touched by this. Cristina said good bye to us on the shore of the island.

Victor and his son Eddie took us back, this time with one boat with a motor pulling the one that didn´t have one.  We got out last view of the islands:

We arrived at the place where we could take the “collectiva” to the hotel and Eddie then followed us all the way to the hotel.

We had lunch at the very good restaurant at the hotel, but longed for the food on Qhantati.

The rest of the day we locked ourselves into the hotel room and did an intense 6 hour schooling session.

Tomorrow we have to get up at 4:30. We leave southern Peru and head for the Amazon.

Eirik

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