Puno, Peru. A Town To Pass

This is a town I would recommend to either skip or just visit for half a day between Cusco, Peru and Copacabana, Bolivia. We arrived in this town because we wanted to make sure all of our visa requirements for Bolivia were straightened away before crossing (Click here to see the requirements as Americans) and we wanted to see what Lake Titicaca was like on the Peruvian side!  We got off the bus around 6am from Cusco and started our 20-minute walk to our hotel I found off booking.com. We arrived on Good Friday and surprisingly; an incredible street market was going on! Lots of fruit, veggies, fish and street stalls were open and it seemed as though the whole small village was shopping there. That street market was our favorite thing about this small town. After eating some ceviche and buying some street empanandas we walked straight to the main pier on the lake and booked an impromptu boat tour for a few dollars to see the floating villages that Puno is known for! The short boat ride was great and seeing the actual houses and floating villages were incredible but get ready for a huge tourist trap. You will get told a brief history lesson of the floating islands and afterwards you will get asked to shop around to the few stalls on the island you are at. Then from there you will get charged a small fee to ride another boat to a different part of the floating village where there are restaurants and souvenirs to buy and that’s the end of the tour. It takes away the feeling of wanting to learn more when really they don’t want to share their culture or history they just want  money out of you. Once we were done with the two-hour tour it is back to the main part of Puno where all the restaurants on the pier were overpriced so we passed them to try and find more street food. That is all that Puno truly had to offer that we found. If I were you I would just take the bus straight from Cusco to Copacabana. It was 40 soles for an overnight bus to Puno from Cusco and 65 to Copacabana. When we left Puno to get to Copacabana it was 22 soles. I would say just pass this town and head to the better side of Lake Titicaca! You won't regret skipping this town.