Islands in the Sun, Part I: Lake Titicaca, Peru

Ah, what a wonderful week it´s been. After spending our time hiking and sightseeing in the Sacred Valley, it was time for a little culture, sun, and precious R n´R. So off to Lake Titicaca we went. Lake Titicaca is a huge body of water straddling the Peru/Bolivia border and is awarded with all sorts of useless trivia - the classic being the ¨highest navigatable lake in the world¨. Though I´m not sure if that´s actually true, it is one spectacular place, at 3800 meters above sea level.

Our first stop on our tour of the lake was to the legendary floating Islands. Since back in the days of the Incas, the Uro people of the area began to build islands out of reeds on which they lived to protect themselves from attacts. Today, though no doubt kept alive by tourism, this way of life is still very common, and you can find islands were everything - homes, food, boats, and even their land is made out of reeds.

The next stop on our Island tour was to an Island called Amantani, an island occupied by a small, farming, Ayamara speaking community. These people live very much like they have for centuries, living pretty much self sufficiently on their crops of potatoes and corn. They were also nice enough to allow tourists to crash for the night in their homes, and so our night was spent with me and Lisa crowded into the family´s (parents, two girls and two boys) kitchen eating soup and potatoes and attempting to communicate in broken spanish (which they also speak). But after dinner, we joined up with the rest of the group for some traditional music and dancing, dressed in their traditional clothes.

The next day we were off to the next Island, Taquile, a Quechua speaking Island with a distinct resemblance of something found in Greece. The place was stunning, and though we only stayed for an afternoon before the long boat ride back to the mainland, it was quite an awesome place to stop for lunch and pretend for just a minute that it was 35 degrees and not 3800 meters up in the air.
The next day, after enjoying the Peruvian side of things, it was off too Bolivia to see how the Bolivians do things on their side of the water.....