Young Uros Islander
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Peru 3 - Puno and Lake Titicaca | Young Uros Islander |
We arrived in Peru from Ecuador towards the end of July, crossing into the northern border town of Tumbes. We flew down to Lima to avoid the barren deserts of the north, and flew out of Lima as soon as we could to avoid being mugged. After Lima, we relaxed for four days in Cusco, formerly the capital of the Inca empire, now gringo tourist capital of Peru. After all that relaxing we decided to try and kill ourselves with exhaustion on the Inca Trail, a four day trek over Andean peaks following the original Inca Highway to Macchu Picchu. From Cusco we took a eleven hour train journey across the altiplano to Puno on the shores of lake Titicaca, where we visited the floating reed islands of Uros and the idyllic Taquilla island, where we stayed overnight with a local family. Back in Puno, we were robbed and un-robbed in all in one day, before getting a bus to Bolivia
We rose at six, and gathered our things. It was sad to be leaving the Hostal Macchu Picchu and Cusco, and we said goodbye to the hotel manager and his permanent smiles. The station was crowded with people, both locals and travellers, and the train for the long journey south was ready on the platform. We had just enough time to grab a coffee and some dry empanadas before boarding.
 Poweful diesels keep one of thw World's highest railways running |
We had chosen to travel pulman class, comfy reserved seats and a free lunch thrown in. We found ourselves sitting oppose a Japanese couple in their late twenties. He was busy with a very expensive digital camera filming everything in site, including us! They were on their own mini-world tour, and had already been to Hawaii, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and the Easter Islands. Peru was their last stop. "So how long have you been on the road?" I asked. It took them a while to unbderstand the vernacular "on the road" before he replied "Ah, 17 days." They must have spent most of that in aeroplanes! I'd heard a 'travellers myth' about a Korean lad doing a tour around every country in South America, spending less than 2 days in each on average. The powerful diesels of the train revved up and we pulled out of the station on time. Waiters came round with tea and coffee. It was all very civilised, very different from our ride on the roof in Ecuador. |
A landsacape of arid brown mountains rolled past, and before long we started to climb high up into the Altiplano, a vast desolate high altitude plateau. The sky was the most incredible deep azure, and big. There were few settlements up here, just the odd sunbaked mud farm, and leathery campesinos herding Llama and Alpaca.
| The highest point
on the trip is a shabby town called La Raya, at 4300m above sea level.
Its an impoverished huddle of adobe huts. The train stopped at the
station which seemed overly grand for the size of town. Locals appeared
at the windows dressed in colourful wool shawls, all the women bore
mandatory felt hats. They were pushing their wares up at the windows,
fantastic Alpaca wool clothes for ridiculously low prices. From La Raya,
we maintained a high altitude, crossing the vastness of the Altiplano. Lunch was preceded by a complementary Pisco sour apertif, Pisco being the speciality liqueur in Peru - fantastic. Katie had a sprite instead, which she accidentally knocked over and sprayed all over our the dressed Japanese tourists. Lots of smiles and apologies, paper tissues later. Lunch was a half a roast chicken with chips and a sachet of ketchup. Katie squeezed her ketchup sachet, and for some reason, it came out at right angles all over the expensive looking silk blouse of the Japanese woman opposite. It was like Laurel and Hardy. Profuse apologies were offered, and being Japanese they were very polite about it. |
 Local hawkers at La Raya |
 Llama herds on the Altiplano |
The landscape was unchanging for three hours we rumbled past endless beige fields, llama, mountains, blue sky, more scrubland. Nothing grows up here - herdin Llama is about the only agricultural pastime. I dozed off. It was almost dark by the time we rolled into Juliaca, a forbidding town. One of my friends from home had been robbed on the train here, and pulling in on the train, I could believe it. The locals were jeering and sneering at the train from a grubby market stalls that resembled an endless junk yard. The Japanese tourists were avidly videoing the scene as local lads gestured rudely at him from the side of the track. |
We had a choice to make here of whether or mnot to stay with the train to Puno, or get off and get a bus. The train was due to stop in Juliaca for two hours for an engine train - in the dark! Local thieves have been known to board the train and strip it bare of any bags that aren't thoroughly chained down. We decided to take our chances on the streets and look for a bus, which wasn't as bad as it sounds, since about eighty other people had the same idea - safety in numbers!
The bus to Puno was a collectivo, a minibus crammed full of people. It was the first collectiveo we'd seen since Central America where they dominate the local transport scene. The roof rack was piled dangerously high with bags and we set off at a hair raising pace. It took just 45 minutes to get to the outskirts Puno. Some kind of fiesta or march was taking place in the streets, with dozens of youth bands parading the streets, it took us a while to reach the hotel.
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stay at the Hotel Tumi, but almost left in disgust since there was a
great deal of bartering and confusion over the room. It started at 60
Nuevo Soles, dropped to 30, went up to 45 and dropped to 30 NS again -
about £7. Katie did most of the negotiation - she's very good at
it, a real terrier! We were led up a maze of stairs and corridors to a
room. It was spartan and cold - but adequate. The temperature in Puno,
at its altitude of 3800m, usually drops below zero overnight. We wrapped up warm and headed out for something to eat. Puno is a pleasant town on the shores of Lake Titicaca. It is more modern than Cusco, but has a good collection of bars and reastaurants. Most of the action is concentrated on one street, Jiron Lima. We entered the dreadfully named 'Show Café Turistica Huancaya'. It was really awful, with recorded pan pipe music playing old favourites like Bridge over Troubled Water. We had to leave or we'd have been ill. We went to a place called La Taverna, recommended in the Rough Guide for its pizza an its 'amazing garlic bread'. Well the pizza was ok, but the garlic bread comprised four slices of stale white slice toast with garlic salt sprinkled on top. "Is the Rough Guide taking the piss or what?" I complained. |
 Indian girls at Sillustani |
The next day I woke up to a crisis on the clothing front. All my boxer shorts had been worn at least twice so I was reduced to wearing swimming trunks. We therefore spent the morning doing the domestic bit, getting the washing done, films developed, writing postcards home etc. Katie was in seventh heaven when we found an excellent café serving the best cream cakes this side of Paris, for lunch. After lunch we took a trip out to Sillustani a nearby pre-Inca burial site. The bus was an hour latye leaving Puno, which was irritating. More irritating was the fact we then drove at snails pace to SIllustani, such that it was nearly 5pm by time we got there and almost getting dark.
Sillustani |
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Sillustani is a Pre-Inca burial site, some 30km north of Puno. It
comprises a collection of circular tombs, which look a bit like giant
cruet sets, scattered over several acres of dusty hills by a lake. Some
of the structures date from 200BC, in other words, way before the Incas
were even a twinkle in their mothers eye. This was the place where
powerful nobles 'kings' even, were buried along with all of their
favourite possessions. Favourite possessions included slaves, animals,
mistresses and wives, whether or not they felt like being interred, they
had no choice in the matter. Amongst the ruins, there is a semi-submerged obelisk structure, which is symbolic of fertility, a phallus. A few metres away there is a hole which is said to represent the female parts, and when the sun shines from a particular angle the shadow of the phallus reaches the hole in the ground etc. It sounded like a right load of drivel to me, and the hole looked like it had been dug only last week. |
 Chulpa - Burial Chamber |
Lake Titicaca at 3850m is the highest navigable lake in the world. It's one of those lakes which is so large you can't see the other side. It is five times the size of lake Geneva in Europe. The altitude makes the horizon seem bigger, sharper almost circular. It feels like you're inside an enormous blue dome and it's most impressive. The name Titicaca is Quechua and it means 'grey puma'. Supposedly the lake looks like a puma from the air, but youd need a very good imagination or a shot of hallucinogenic drugs to see it really.
Puno is the best place on the Peruvian side of the lake to organise trips. There are dozens of boatmen willing to take you out into its calm vast waters. We got there early in the morning to find a confusion of motor launches fiercely vying for business. We picked one which was almost full - less time to wait. There was a guide on board the effervescent Bruno. "I work for Cusi tours, and Cusi means Happy in Quechua, so I want you all to be happy! Is everybody smiling? I cringed into my seat dreading the fact that we had another eight hours on this boat with this man. It was way too early in the morning for that kind of forced jollity. "Why don't we all introduce ourselves!" commanded Bruno. Fortunately, after a while, Bruno's fizz lost its energy and we were able relax and enjoy the chugging of the boat as we left Puno behind.
| Just beyond the Bay of Puno, which is itself several miles across, you come upon the Islas de Uros. These are a collection of forty or so floating reed islands, each housing a mini community of fisshermen. The islands vary a lot in size, the smallest having just seven huts, and the largest housing several hundred people in sixty fivce huts, including a school and medical centre. All of these islands are constructed of a makeshift bed of reeds that gradually rots from below. The top layers need constant renewal to avoid catastrophe. | ||
| All of these communities used to be fishermen, who found it safer and more convenient to build islands offshore. These days some of the islands have found tourism to be more lucrative than fishing, and it was at one of these places that we stopped. The islanders were waiting with cheap souvenirs for sale on rugs laid out on top of the reeds. It was a bit of a human zoo. We bought a nasty model of a reed boat out of sympathy as much as anything else. |  |
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The
island itself was very wobbly underfoot, like walking on a waterbed. All
of the buildings are made from reeds too. I wondered how they managed to
cook without burning the place down, so I asked one of the villagers. "Very
carefully" was his response. The fishing boats that are used by the Uros islanders are beautiful reed-constructions that only take about three weeks to make. However they tend to rot within a year. We were invited aboard one, and took a little trip out and around the island, being punted by a local in a beanie hat. < Uros islander punting his boat |
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From Uros, our launch took us out of the bay of Puno into the big lake. It was dead calm, hot and sunny. It's not quite possible to see Bolivia on the other side of the lake. The bright sunlight seems to make the islands float in mid air, and the sky is big and dome like.
| Our ultimate destination today was the island of Taquilla, a fixed island this time, some 7km long and just 1km wide. We could see it from some distance away, since it rises imposingly from the water, a semi-submerged mountain peak. There are over 500 steps from the small harbour to the only village on the island, home to a remote community of indigenous indians, forgotten by the rest of the world for centuries - until now that is. | ||
| Sadly
the island is swamped each day by 7 or 8 tour boats such as ours. The
tourist hordes trample up to the village for a local lunch, but trinkets
from the village girls, and reboard their boats at 2pm for the journey
back. We didn't reboard though - we decided to stay! What a difference.
When the hordes disappear, the island returns to what it's probably been
like for centuries, a wonderful quiet haven of rural living. There are
no motor cars on the island, no roads even, not much electricity. The
tranquillity is fantastic, only the sounds of the odd farm animal and
some peasants sorting out a potato crop. All the locals wear traditional home-spun wool clothes. The men wear pom-pom hats which look a bit too small for their crowns, white hairshirts, waistcoats, woollen trousers and brightly coloured waistbands. The girls wear ballooning skirts with many underlayers, and a blue or black shawls over their head. Shoes are a rarity. |
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It's a poor place, but incredibly friendly, probably the friendliest place we came across in South America, lots of smiles and some shyness despite the onslaught of tourists. We stayed with a local family who had a spare few rooms in their adobe house. There are no official guest houses or hotels on the island. The villagers refuse to have them. The accommodation was basic, hole in the ground latrine, no running water, no electricity, straw mattress. Food is also limited to what they grow or fish. Having dropped our bag, we went for a walk around the island, There are some ruins of ancient Inca farms in the middle, and the current day inhabitants benefit from the extensive Inca terracing of the fields. We walked up to the peak of the main mountain on the island, Pachamama, to see the sunset, which was amazing, before returning to the village to look for somewhere to eat. | |
| There's a charming central square with a dimly lit restaurant, which displayed a sizeable menu. Despite this, the only dishes on offer were a watery soup and egg and potatoes or chips. |  Sunset over Lake Titicaca |
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| After
dinner, we returned to the guest house, where the owner had brought in a
couple of his friends for some music making, playing for someone's
birthday. We unwittingly gatecrashed the celebration. The music was
ethnic, a cacophonous beating of drums and gasping repetitive blasting
on pan pipes. Every song was identical. At one point the band had to
stop playing, they were laughing so much at the gringo attempts at
dancing. I woke to a fierce sunrise blazing through the window. Sleep had been fitful on the hard bed. We had a cold pancake for breakfast, accompanied by a local infusion called mate de muna, which had half a tree in it. The morning was baking hot, and we spent it with Isobel, the five-year old daughter of the family drawing pictures. She had an incredibly good eye for a five year old, drawing things as they actually are as opposed to the usual five-year old stick man type representations. In the afternoon, we took the boat back to Puno. It was a long slow journey. |
 Taquilla Musician |
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| We went back to the Hotel Tumi for a shower, but the water was off. Instead, we headed in to town in search of a local Pena and some food. We couldn't find a pena so we settled for fish and rice at a local café. | ||
Today, we intended to head out to Bolivia on an early bus, but we woke to find we had been robbed. A green wallet containing about half of our travellers cheques had mysteriously gone astray overnight from our hotel room. We frantically emptied all our bags searching for the missing wallet. It was nowhere. I went out to the hotel reception where a gnome-like man showed very little interest. He suggested we might have left the cheques in a restaurant or something, but we never take them out with us. I immediately suspected his hand in it. I explained that the cheques could not be cashed without a passport, that I was going to cancel them and whoever tried to cash them would probably get arrested, and that I was going out to look for a police man. We stormed out of the hotel, sure that we would now miss our bus to La Paz, and went in search of an international phone to make the cancellations. But it was early on a Sunday morning and all the phone offices were closed. We came back to the hotel, where we met the hotel manger, and re-explained to him what had happened. He suggested we speak to the owner, I didn't see much point, but we went upstairs anyway. As we waited for the owner, a man came in from the La Paz bus - we hadn't missed it after all, it was running late and he urged us to board now. It was decision time, should we abandon this robbing hotel, get to La Paz and cancel our cheques there, or should we stay and heap trouble on them. We decided to go, abandoned our interview with the owner, and dashed into our room to hurriedly re-pack our belongings which were strewn all over the room from our earlier search for the cheques. I opened my bag, to start stuffing, to find the green wallet had miraculously reappeared in the time we had been upstairs, obviously replaced by the gnome-like robber receptionist on orders from the management. We asked no questions, there was no time, the bus was waiting. We'd been robbed and unrobbed all in one day.
The bus took a couple of hours to skirt around the shores of Lake Titicaca, to the border town of Yunguyo. We changed our remaining Nuevo Soles into Bolivanos at a poor rate. Peruvian immigration was a simple formality, and we soon found ourselves walking across the border, through a stone arch into Bolivia. Peru's nicely paved road instantly became a dirt track. Bolivia is one of South America's poorest countries, crippled by poor government, a history of labour relations problems, low exploitation of natural resources and a mammoth national debt. Same old story but worse!
You are
reading the story of Adrian and Katie's travels through the Americas
between May and August 1998.
Adrian and Katie put the rat race on hold for a year to travel the world.
Adrian & Katie's World Tour News - Peru 3 Last Updated: 13 August 1999 Web Page by Adrian Ball (email: adrian.ball@virgin.net)