Travel expectantly: Every place you visit is like a surprise package to be opened. Untie the strings with an expectation of high adventure.
October 2, 2013
To my great delight, I met a couple from Oregon, Jerry and Debbie, at my hotel. They spoke English! And ironically, they'd lived in Juneau for 30 years before retiring south. These wonderful people were kind enough to let me tag along with them for a day on Lake Titicaca.
Rather than paying more for one of the organized tours, they'd decided to take the community boat out to Uros and Taquile. Afterwards, we agreed that the only thing we probably hadn't gotten in our cheap travels was an English-speaking guide. What fun it was to listen to and decipher the Spanish, though! My comprehension was pretty darn good when lots of hand gestures and visual aides were involved.
Our little motorboat puttered through channels of reeds for about 30 minutes to our first destination: the floating reed islands of Uros. Home to about 2,000 people, these islands are literally built from mats of reeds, and have to be anchored to keep them from floating away. Being so close to Puno, Uros is pretty well focused on tourism as an economic base, but I understand there are other communities of reed islands in more remote areas of Lake Titicaca that live mostly traditional lifestyles.
Upon our arrival, we were greeted by a local man who gave us a little lecture on how the islands are built, and about the people. Lucky for me, there were lots of visual aides! It helped, too, that the lecture was in Spanish, and not in the native Quechua.
Most of his lecture revolved around how the reed islands are built. He never did describe how one is started from scratch, but mostly discussed how they are maintained. He had two blocks of reed mat that he built a little village on to show us how it was done.
Basically, the islands are two-to-three-foot-thick mats of totora reeds. As the mat rots from the bottom, new reeds are laid down in bundles on top. The result is a springy walking surface that stays reasonably dry. (I did find one path that needed new reeds - my feet got wet when I walked across one spot.) Understandably, boats go slow around the islands, but I could still feel boat wakes travel through the reeds and rock the island a bit.
The people of Uros originally took to island life as a defensive measure. If their enemies got too close, they could just pull up the stakes holding their islands in place and move. Even now, the islands had many tall watch towers built of reeds. Some of these towers were elaborate constructions designed to look like fish and flamingos; unfortunately, my photos of these didn't turn out well.
As he talked, our guide was assisted by his wife and daughter. He noted that he had grown up on his father's island nearby, but that he now lives on his mother's island (I didn't quite catch how all of this worked, but that was the gist of it). Uros looked to be made up of upwards of 100 islands all anchored together to make a community of about 2,000 people. There are three primary schools, but children have to go to Puno to continue their education beyond that.
Although it appeared tourism had become an important part of the local economy, traditionally the Uros people relied on fishing. My assumption is that they would trade fish for other goods they needed. The women demonstrated great skill in embroidery and weaving. They also made reed mobiles and doodads, I suspect solely for the tourist trade.
While the locals now have motor boats for transportation, they originally used boats made of reeds to travel around Lake Titicaca. I suspect they may still use them for inter-island hops, and certainly to get a few more Soles out of tourists. A young local man gave us a ride in a fanciful boat about 20 feet long. He said this one had a core of recycled plastic bottles for floatation. At least a few of the millions of plastic water bottles that plague Peru every year are getting used for something. He'd gone to secondary school in Puno, and spoke excellent English. While he makes his living from tourism, his father relies on fishing for income. The young man poled the boat we rode on between two islands, but given that Lake Titicaca has an average depth of 350 feet, they must have had some other means of propulsion, too.
Not surprisingly, fire is a real concern on an island where everything is made from dried reeds. They use carefully supervised fires in little clay stoves for cooking, but I would guess there's no attempt to heat their homes, even in winter. I saw little in the way of heaters in Peru in any sort of housing. I assume the stove I photographed isn't in active use given its overgrown location.
After an hour or so on Uros, our little boat puttered on to Taquile, a rock-and-soil island about two hours away. Taquile is home to about 2,200 people who live a subsistence lifestyle augmented by tourist dollars. The locals are known as excellent weavers, and the men are superb knitters. They start knitting as little boys, and are particularly known for knitting their own hats. Married men wear red hats (with intricate designs), and unmarried men red and white hats. Married men also wear elaborately woven belts made by their wives. I never got tired of the bright colors and fabulous designs in Peru! I don't have much information about Taquile, so I'll just share my photos.
