Puno

Islands are built from layered reed, and the ground gives under your feet. Fresh reed has to be laid on top every couple of weeks or they sink.

Three hours out by boat, on an island where the men do the knitting. The shape of a man's hat says whether he is married.

You stay a night with an island family and eat at their table. Power is limited, so a torch is used after dark and the stars come out in number.

Cylindrical stone tombs stand on a hill by the water, some reaching 12m. A people who came before the Inca raised them, and each widens toward the top.

Boats to the islands leave the harbour in a group each morning. They run slowly, over three hours, so water and something to eat travel with you.

In February hundreds of dance troupes and bands fill the city for days. Masks and costumes differ by troupe, and a year goes into preparing them.

Six hundred and twenty steps end at a lookout across the city and the lake. The altitude can stretch that climb to half an hour.

Shipped from Britain in pieces in 1862 and carried up by mule to be assembled here. It stays moored as a museum and visitors walk through it.

A train crosses the high plain from Cusco in ten hours. It tops a pass at 4300m, and alpaca herds pass the window.

A road follows the southern shore to the neighbouring country's border. From the border village the range across the water shows.

Puno's 18th-century cathedral faces the main square with a grey stone front dense with carving. The mason behind the facade is known to have cut his own name into it. Inside is plain by comparison, so the front is where people linger.

A walled enclosure in the lakeside village of Chucuito, south of Puno, full of dozens of phallic stone pillars. It is billed as Inca, though when it was made is disputed. The village's two colonial churches round out the visit.

A village on the lake's southern shore with four colonial churches, nicknamed the little Rome of the Americas. The Jesuits built them while running a mission centre here. Which church is open varies day to day, so ask a local.

The Church of Santiago, built of pinkish stone on high ground over the lake. Thin alabaster sheets fill the windows instead of glass, so the light inside glows softly. Travellers bound for the Bolivian border often break the drive here.

A town on the plateau north of Puno, called the pink city for its painted walls. The church holds a replica of Michelangelo's Pieta. Below it lies a crypt with bones stacked in the walls, visited with a guide.

Village-run homestays at Llachon, out on the Capachica Peninsula. It is mainland rather than island, so a car from Puno can get there too. Guests help in the fields or with fishing and watch sunset from the lakeside hill.

Round and square burial towers on a flat-topped hill on the plateau southwest of Puno. Pumas, snakes and other animals are carved in relief on the walls. It draws a fraction of Sillustani's crowds, and the wind is the only sound.