27-Apr-2004 -- I had been hoping to find a confluence somewhere on this trip. We fled Lima as quickly as possible, Nazca didn’t seem to have one anywhere near a road, Canyon del Colca had such amazingly high and varied terrain that I wasn’t up for attempting it with the little time we had. I had suspected we could come across a confluence in Lake Titicaca, but didn’t have a map and wasn’t certain. That morning we had cruised out to Uros, the floating reed islands in Lake Titicaca and it seemed unlikely that we would be able to find a confluence on the lake (if there is one) without a bucket of money, and a private boat.

When we returned to cozy Puno, I headed to an internet station and checked out this site. Previously, I hadn’t noticed the Mapquest maps - but this time I found a map showing that we would probably do well by heading south and finding a confluence on land. An attempt to print the Mapquest map was a failure, it printed the star, and most words, but the streets didn’t print. I drew a street in, as well as the name of the next town we would get to and headed out to find a taxi.

Lisa speaks spanish well, and I was very happy that she was up for the adventure. It was already well past 3pm and the sun set around 5:30. Taxi’s were hanging around our hotel - two of the drivers either didn’t understand what we were trying to do, or had no interest in it... they suggested D, who quickly opened his little doors for us and we were off.

From Puno we headed South for about half an hour. When we got to 16 S. and 70 + 1k W. we parked on the side of the road and turned the hazard lights on. Our taxi driver decided to join us on our hike. He grabbed a tire iron from the trunk (I didn’t know about this until we returned) and we were off. The terrain was mostly flat and covered in a coarse grass. Mountains laid in the distance in every direction. There were dry creek beds throughout and occasionally some wet ones that weren’t too difficult to cross. Not very far into our journey we passed a tiny farm house - and were chased by dogs. The dogs got pretty close, but we never ran, and they soon got bored of us. Our total hike east was half an hour or so - a race we won against the Westbound sun.

Finding the exact point (within 7 m) lead me in a little dance. We snapped a photo in each direction - D told me what 2 of the mountains were called - I’ll fill that in later -

It was very exciting, I felt very content when we were finished. We took the last photo of the area just as the sun set, walked back in twilight and drove away with slightly less than 1/2 a moon.