Plaza Titire

Onto the Puna

Beyond Torata the road begins its real work for the day, climbing out of the valley and onto the altiplano proper — a long, steady ascent that trades cultivated terraces for open puna grassland, then finally for the bare, wind-scoured plateau above 4,000 metres. This is the psychological hinge of the day: somewhere on this climb, the desert coast of Peru gives way for good to the high plateau that will define the rest of the route to Lake Titicaca.

Lunch — Plaza Titire

By early afternoon the road reaches Titire, a small alpaca-herding settlement at over 4,000 metres near the boundary between the Moquegua and Puno regions — a boundary that, as it happens, both regions have historically claimed for themselves, leaving Titire's roughly one thousand residents caught in an unresolved tug-of-war between two departments. The village's economy runs almost entirely on alpaca: an estimated ten thousand head graze the surrounding puna, and their meat and wool, worked into warm clothing, are sold from the settlement to travellers passing through on the highway. The Plaza Titire, at the centre of the village alongside a small sports court and a community hall built with support from a nearby mining operation, is the natural place to stop, stretch, and — if the timing and available food allow — take lunch among the only settlement of any size for a long stretch of empty puna in either direction.