This past weekend was my first long distance trip away from Cusco.
About seven to ten hours, depending on what bus you take, southeast from
Cusco is the highest commercially navigable lake in the world, Lake Titicaca
(pronounced exactly how you think). The lake sits at 12,500 feet above
sea level on the border of Peru and Bolivia, is the largest lake in South
America, and has a series of islands that are well worth visiting. Early
Friday morning, I took the all day Inka Express tourist bus from Cusco to Puno,
the main city on the Peruvian side of the lake.
The bus ride was about as comfortable as a ten hour bus ride could be, and
being that it was the tourist bus, it stopped at four different sites and one
buffet lunch. The sites included the church at Andahuaylillas, considered
the Sistine Chapel of the Andes, the Incan temple and town of Raqchi, a
roadside stop at La Raya at over 14,200 feet, and the small town of
Pukara. The highlight was clearly the all you can eat buffet, however,
which offered my first taste of Alpaca meat. One of the more interesting
parts of the trip was seeing the landscape change as we passed over of the tree
line at 12,500 feet. For the second half of the trip, we barely saw a
single tree.
About forty five minutes before we arrived in Puno, we passed through the
largest city in the lake region, Juliaca. This city has over 380,000
inhabitants, and because of a tax loophole that allows people to pay lower
property taxes so long as their house is still being built, houses stay under
perpetual construction lasting generations. The town was frankly the most
miserable place I have ever seen. It looked like an atomic bomb had gone
off there fifteen years ago and the inhabitants had only recently climbed out
of their fallout shelters.
That night, I stayed at a hostel in Puno because my trip out to the lake
did not begin until Saturday morning, and being the way my trips have generally
gone, I had a fairly interesting encounter that evening. The hostel had
three guests staying in it, myself included, but I didn’t see the other two until
check out the next morning. Faced with the option of sitting in a hostel
by myself for the evening, I decided to go grab a beer at a local bar and kill
a couple hours before bedtime. Down on the main street in Puno, I found a
place, went in and ordered a drink. After sitting at a table alone for
about five or ten minutes, a lady at a nearby table waived me over to join here
and her daughter. They said they were from Pittsburgh, and the two of
them were celebrating the daughter´s high school graduation.
Coincidentally, they had recently finished the Inca Trail trek to Machu Picchu,
which I am starting next Saturday, and we talked for a bit about what to
expect. The conversation started to take a turn towards weird when they
described their return from Machu Picchu, however, and were very forthcoming about
some of their mother-daughter activities. Apparently, at some point they
decided to spend a few days in Ollantaytambo, which included an all night
¨medicinal¨ spiritual trek to various Incan temple ruins with a local shaman
named Wow. Shortly after admitting this, the mother pointed to her
tie-dye t-shirt and told me that in addition to being some kind of computer
programmer by day, she was a ¨transformational tie-dye artist¨ by
night. I thought that was some kind of odd joke until she explained
that she designs tie-dye shirts based on the customer for the purpose of
spiritually transforming them. She learned this while apprenticing for
some Pittsburgh lady from a small Peruvian town. There are only so many
ways to respond to off the wall comments like this, and four weeks into this
trip, I´ve become rather adept at doing so. I soon finished by beer and
headed back to the hostel, chalking this up to just another friendly encounter
in South America.
The next
morning, I was picked up by my tour group and taken down to the docks with a
few other families. We were split up and
put of various boats that were chaotically collecting tourists. I didn’t see my tour company again for the
rest of the trip. I guess they sold me
off to another group. The boat that I
ended up on became my de facto tour group for the rest of the trip and included
a pretty diverse group of people: two families from Peru, a family from France,
a couple from Germany, a couple from Brazil, two British dental students, and a
girl from The Netherlands. Our first
stop was the Uros Islands an hour from the shore.
The floating
Uros Islands are the most famous attraction on the lake, and originally were
created when the inhabitants around the lake were trying to avoid the Incan
conquest in the 13th century.
They used naturally formed floating bricks of soil and reeds to create
islands that float on the lake. The
islands are about six feet thick, and each only last thirty years. After thirty years, the island degrades, and
a new one has to be built. There are
sixty islands in the group presently, and each houses five to seven
families. In total, the chain has about
2,000 inhabitants. Each tour group is
sent to a separate island, and is given a routine demonstration of how the
islands are made and what life is like on the islands. Almost everything on the island is
constructed out of reeds, the most notably exception being the solar panels
that power the TVs in these anachronistic communities.
After leaving
the Uros, we set off for the island of Amantaní, where we were to spend the
afternoon and night. Amantaní was a
three hour boat ride, or two hour swim, from the Uros, and once we arrived, it was
clear that tourism was a very new visitor to the island. As part of the community’s effort to control
the effects of tourism, instead of constructing hotels on the island, tourists
are assigned hosts families to stay with for the night. I was put in a house with the two Brits from
the group. Now the island has very
little electricity, and the candle and matchbox waiting in my room was a very
clear reminder that my house was no different.
Each host family
is responsible for feeding their guest lunch, dinner, and breakfast while
there, and we had lunch as soon as we arrived.
Peru is the land of the potato.
Peruvians claim to have invented the potato, and their cuisine certainly
supports the claim. Over 3,000 types of
potato are grown in Peru, and rarely do you have a meal without at least one
type of potato in it. White rice is also
a favorite addition to Peruvian cuisine.
Thus far, seeing something green on my plate begs me to wonder what the
special occasion is. The other main
staple of Peruvian cuisine is some sort of broth soup served before the main
course. The weirdest part of dining in
Peru, however, has to be how no one drinks anything while they eat. If you look around a restaurant, you will
barely see a single local with water or tea in front of their meal. In fact, if you order a drink in a
restaurant, it is best to let the waiter know that you like water as a
compliment to your meal, and not as a dessert.
Eating a plate full of rice and potatoes without something to wash it
down is a minor challenge.
The food on
Amantaní shared the rest of Peru’s love affair with rice and potatoes but to
the nth degree. My dinner, for instance,
was potato soup followed by a plate of white rice and potatoes. The third, fourth, and fifth vegetarian meals
of my life all occurred while I was with the host family. Meat is considered a luxury only served for
special occasions on the level of family weddings. That was fairly understandable given the
altitude, and lack of livestock on Amantaní.
What was less intuitive, though, was how fish is served no more than
twice a week on a meat-less island in the middle of one of the largest lakes in
the world. As lunch on Taquile the next
day would prove, other islands seemed to have no problem taking advantage of the
abundance of fish in the lake, but the people of Amantaní preferred the
backbreaking work of potato farming.
While on the
island, we hiked to the temple ruins on top of one of the hills on the island
to watch the sunset, putting us huffing and puffing 13,700 feet above sea
level. From that vantage point, the lake
was beautiful, and it was possible to take in the sheer size of it. Lake Titicaca has the aesthetic advantage of
being massive enough to be dramatic and majestic, but also small enough that the
high peaks across the lake in Bolivia provide a faint backdrop to the seemingly
endless water.
For our tourists’
hearts delight, the entertainment that night was a staged dance at the local
community center. All of the women were
put into the elaborate dress of the local ladies, while all of us men were
given a less intricate poncho to wear.
The dances basically consisted of people casually walking in a large
circle while swinging joined hands back and forth. It was fun, but I doubt it will impress if I
bust out the move on a dance floor back in Dallas.
The next
morning, we left for the island of Taquile about an hour from Amantaní. Taquile has an incredibly strong and unique
traditional heritage, which can still be seen in the customs of the
locals. Like the other islands of the
lake, the people on Taquile are primarily farmers, and the island is very rural. Also like Amantaní, the residents responded
to the peaking interests of tourists by heavily regulating and controlling the
tourist experience on the island. This
has left the island´s tradition and way of life very much still intact. The people of Taquile are renowned for their
weaving and knitting, and as you walk around the island, you see many of the men
standing around knitting. Each man knits
a Santa-shaped hat that signifies their corresponding Facebook relationship
status. An all red hat means the man is
married. A red and white one flopped
over to the side signifies single and on the prowl for a wife. A red and white one flopped to the back means
single and not quite ready to mingle.
Additionally, men weave belts that double as back supports for working
in the fields that are full of traditional symbols often signifying the local
monthly calendar.
After eating
lunch on the Taquile, we boarded the boat once more and headed back to
Puno. The trip took about three hours,
and like our trip to the islands the day before, was interspersed with moments
of our engine dying and the captain having to roll up his sleeves and play
amateur mechanic. I had about six hours
to kill in Puno—about five more than anyone ever needs in Puno—and then hopped
aboard an overnight bus back to Cusco.
After getting back and sleeping in all morning, I can say that the trip
was well worth it. Since first planning
my Peru tripped, I had hoped that I would be able to fit in a weekend on the
lake at some point, and I don’t think the whole experience could have gone much
better.
Scott
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