The Titicaca Lake is the highest navigable lake of the world (3.800 m). "Titi" means "Puma" and "caca" means "grey", it is the Lake of the grey Puma. There are two explanations to this, one is that the grey Pumas lived around here in the mountains in the past and came down to the lake to drink, the other is more recent as - following NASA space-pictures - it turns out that the shape of the lake is the one of a puma catching a rabbit... and the water of the lake from above looks grey.. as for the Nazca lines, it would however be a mystery how they could see this from above at the time the lake got its name... were the people here in the pre-Inka times already able to fly??? Well, I will not start this discussion here.. plenty of crazy scientists have already elaborated on it..
I left - yet again at 7h00 - to take the boat to visit the floating Islands and Taquile. The floating Islands (there are actually over 40 of them) are made of reed only, to be precise, the floating basis is made of the compact of roots of reed and then they put several layers of reed on top of it. It was actually an old tradition of the Uros, but the last Uro-woman died in 1956 and then the Aymara, from the land next to Puno, settled down on these floating islands. They use reed for everything: to build the island itself, to build the houses on the island, to build their ships, to use it to make fire for cooking (after having dried it..) and they also eat the interior of it (which has actually absolutely no taste whatsoever.., which means that it is not disgusting either...)! They explained to us the techniques of "how to build an island" (which is always useful to know in case you need one... why not somewhere in the Carribbean ??) and told us a bit about their traditions. Usually four to six families live on the same island and if there is trouble, you can just split the island in two or several parts. This makes conflicts between neighbours very easy to solve... Then we got a boat ride in their traditional boats to the main island, which mainly consisted of shops and bars and a guesthouse.. nothing spectacular. To be noted however, that the only real house there (also floating) was a Seven Days Adventist Church built in stone it seemed (but then how does it float??) or at least in wood. This "Church", it is actually rather a sect, seems to "buy" their followers by promising "real" houses... for the moment the success does not seem to be enormous given that almost all houses are still made out of reed and floating on a reed base.
From there we had a 3 hours boat trip to the island of Taquile, which is still organised in a real community / cooperative: They share - depending on the needs of everyone - their harvests and also successfully resist since quite a while to initiatives to build a hotel on the island, which would certainly endanger the whole community structure. Guests can still stay there but they pay the community and the community decides in which house the stranger will sleep (on an equal burden sharing basis). The profits therefore do not go to just a few but to the collectivity. The island is beautiful with extremely nice views on the lake and very nice agricultural terraces. By pure luck, I arrived the day of their annual big festivity: the harvest festival, quite an event: The whole main square was full of locals all dressed in their traditional costumes and playing music and dancing.. Something is quite extraordinary on this island: it is actually the men's task to knit their own hats, which symbolize their social and marital status (together with the rest of their clothes). So you can easily distinguish, who is married and who is single, who has a function in the administration of the island and even among the non married, you can distinguish whether they have a girl friend or whether they are "looking". After we had got this explanation you just had to examine all the people around in order to decrypt their life.. this was quite an amusing activity. We had a very tasty grilled trout ("trucha") for lunch.. it is a specific species living in the lake and actually does not reseemble at all to the trouts I know from Europe..
We also had a very nice walk around the island, which actually meant to climb first steep uphill to get from the first harbour to the main village and then from there, 580 steps down back to the main harbour.. quite a physical effort at such an altitude...
To say a word about the climate: during the day it is actually mostly warm as the sun always shines (!!! yes my friends in Belgium, this is true !!!). Given the altitude of over 3.800 m the sun is also very strong.. however, there can be a chilly breeeze and as soon as the sun goes down, it gets really cold... (below 10 degrees) and in the early morning, it is below zero...
The hotel here in Puno has no heating (!!!), which is almost normal, but it has hot water around the clock (which in many hotels is not the case.. ) I heard some pretty scary stories about this since the water is so freeeeeezing cold that I would not even want to wash my face with it, not speaking about having a shower !!!! But there are public baths it seems somewhere in town... Anyway, I am glad that I bought this sleeping bag just before leaving because I use it underneath all the duvets they have and then it is actually bearable... I think I would not be able to live in such a cold place for long...
So, that was the story of the day.. hope you enjoyed it... tomorrow I am leaving to the Bolivian side of the lake. Hasta luego, amigos !!!
No comments:
Post a Comment