Centre of the universe
Trip Start
Nov 03, 2004
1
41
165
Trip End
Nov 23, 2006
Puno,
Peru
Monday, June 13, 2005
can either play on-board bingo (first prize is you get to use the PA
to sing a song for the bus), or you can send a lot of time watching
Peru whizz past. After a while you start to notice that the
landscape of Peru is predominantly gray. But it's not the gray of an
Auckland rainy day or storm clouds gathering - it's a complete
rainbow of gray.
The sky is a sort of mildew blue gray with a perpetual haze. The
hills are a lichen green gray with slashes of a healing bruise's
purplish gray where hillsides have slid away. The fields are the
same lichen green gray overlaid with the tussocks' old straw gray.
The fields and terraces are criss-crossed with the volcanic pink gray
of the stonework walls and the steel gray of sluggish icy streams.
There is the occasional flash of silver where the sun glints off the
water. The houses are adobe and a sort of grayish chocolate with
smoky gray thatched roofs. Around the houses graze cuddly gray
Jerusalem donkeys, caramel gray llamas, dusty dog gray alpacas and
cinnamon gray cows. It is like the canvass is overlaid with a
permanent gray filter. Peruvians, however, leap out on top of the
filter and are anything but muted - their dress, their food, their
music, their festivals and their art is riotous with colour and sound
and history.
No one would accuse Puno of being a pretty town. From a distance,
nestling on the bay of Lake Titicaca and spreading up the surrounding
hills, it is almost entirely the grayish chocolate of adobe.
Like inverted cones
No oneever trims the iron reinforcing that sticks up from the supporting
walls of the houses. It makes the town look somehow unfinished, but
David thinks that's the point - it's about hope - one day the house
will grow and, in the meantime, it's a good solid, well constructed,
start. In the middle distance the tourist part of town sports
finished hostels, light-up signs, plenty of restaurant touts and shoe-
shine "boys". Every shop seems to be a combination internet café,
laundry, travel agent and those that aren't are selling identical
alpaca jumpers, scarves and silly hats. They've done some nice
things down on the lake front. Tourists, apparently inexplicably,
want to look at the lake (for Peruvians the lake is a source of
spiritual enrichment and economic necessity but it's just not really
something to waste time on looking at). You do still have to fight
your way through some pretty shady, odiferous territory to get to the
lake front while dodging the bicycle trishaws and homicidal tuk-tuk
drivers, but a rather attractive promenade has been built along the
bay. This forms an artificial lake and is decorated with huge
sculptures of the Inca symbols for the solstices and other important
harvest festivals.
On Saturday morning we entertained ourselves by strolling the
promenade while deflecting shoe shiners, postcard hawkers and focused
trishaw peddlers determined to return us to our hotel. We hired a
reed boat (tourist sized) which we were trusted to take out onto the
artificial lake.
Los Uros
Only David paddled - that seeming like the mostlikely method of remaining upright and pointed in the right
direction. We did crash into some of the floating reeds but nothing
(and no one) went overboard. We soaked up the rest of the morning in
the madness of the Saturday morning market riot. You can buy
anything from fresh fruit, pickled vegetables, pre-made death by
chilli sauces, ladies undies, sheep's faces, chickens and their
innards, ceramic ovens, rainbow trout fresh caught today. No one was
selling alpaca jumpers but you can buy carded, unspun alpaca and
sheep wool. You can have your fortune told, your hair cut, your
pocket picked.
The ladies here favour the Bolivian style of dress with short full
skirt (although preferring sparkly upholstery fabric to velvet) and
layered tops. The bowler hat remains but more likely in cappuchino
than black and with a wasp waisted crown. Men run with the jeans and
baseball cap tradition.
In the afternoon we took a tour to Siilustani outside of Puno. This
is an area where Inca and pre-Inca burial towers have been
preserved/restored. The largest of the towers is 12m high. They
were constructed with an internal chamber into which the mummy is
interned and a external wall made from perfectly fitted, dressed
stone (although not one of the blocks suffered from a right angle).
The external walls angled slightly outwards (like one of those flat
bottomed ice cream cones), so they were perfectly balanced as well.
These tombs were constructed for important members of the community
only.
Off to market
Early in the Inca period only one mummy would be interned ineach tomb. However, in later periods, it became the custom to intern
sacrifices as well. If the deceased's parents or wife survived them
they were usually the chosen sacrifices, however, if they had
predeceased them, then close neighbours would be chosen to accompany
them on their trek to the underworld instead!
The tombs were built on a high promontory surrounded on three sides
by the deep blue water of the area. This particular colour is caused
by a combination of pure water and high altitude's thin atmosphere
making for exceptional reflections. The outlook is dramatic, the
site sun washed but wind swept, lonely but, even now, more solitary
than forgotten or abandoned. It was very beautiful - peaceful and
magnificent for a resting place - centuries of different communities
had agreed it was appropriate.
On the way back to Puno we were invited into the home of one of the
local landholders. The compound was made of the usual adobe brick
and thatch and entered via an arched gateway topped by ceramic bull
fertility symbols. There were several very small rooms all sharing
the outside compound wall and opening onto a central area. The
central area was walled into three different sections. Each room was
about 10' by 8'. None had a door. (In Puno it can get down to -25oC
at night and I slept inside the bed in our hotel in our -2oC sleeping
bag). Outside the compound were tethered the family's three alpaca,
three llama and a flock of some twenty sheep.
Saturday morning market chaos
We were shown examplesof the different potato (frost dried and fresh), barley and quinoa
crops grown on the holding. They gave a demonstration of traditional
carpet making and offered us samples of home made cheese (we're
careful about the water but merrily ate home made cheese from
unpasteurised milk) and warm potatoes with mud sauce (yes, we saw it,
chips of mud dissolved in water - apparently this is good for
ulcers). On the way out there was a cow's head drying on the roof.
On the way to the tombs, at a photo-op stop, an alpaca had kissed
me. This alpaca belonged to a lady parked up waiting for tourists to
pay to have their photo taken with her alpaca. We settled on using
both of them to frame an otherwise depressing photo of Puno. At the
tombs another lady was parked up with a vicuña. When I said I didn't
think they could be domesticated she laughed and assured me they
could. Her vicuña then proceeded to hiss at me, kick me and bite me
twice. The landholder's llamas spat because I got too close to the
baby llama (wonder what they'll do when the family try to eat it?).
Such was my day with Peruvian domesticated animals.
On Sunday we took a tour to the floating islands of the Uros and to
Taquile Island. The floating islands are amazing. They are built up
from layers of matted reeds which grow readily in the lake.
Periodically a new layer has to be added as the bottom layers rot and
the islands sink. They are anchored to the lake bottom by 12m wooden
poles.
Taquile dress code
When the lake waters rise or fall they pull up the anchorsand move the islands, now using motor boats hired from the mainland,
in a concession to modernity. Walking on the islands (which are some
metres thick) feels like walking on a waterbed.
On the islands are whole communities, usually based on family groups
(sometimes up to 40 individuals), living in homes built from the same
reeds, bafflingly cooking their meals over open fires (I'm still not
sure how they don't set the island on fire), building their
improbable reed boats, making their living from the lake (and now the
tourists) and carrying on a tradition, irreversibly impacted by
contact with tourists and their dollars. They have no telephone, no
electricity and the only heating is from the cook fires.
We took a ride between islands in a proper (not tourist sized) reed
boat. These boats are only good for one year before they start to
rot and it takes three months to construct another. There is no
skimping on the details - every boat has a prow constructed in the
form of either a serpent (the Inca symbol for intelligence), a puma
(the Inca symbol for power) or any one of the water birds that abound
on the lake. The boat was some 25' long and was propelled through
the water by one little Uros lady in formal attire and hat while we
lolled around on the reeds. (David, who had paddled a tourist sized
boat the day before, has no idea how she even got the thing moving
let alone travelled any distance - apparently reeds do not make light
boats).
We then motored two hours to Taquile Island in the main body of the
lake. This was apparently the highlight of the tour (to which some
six hours was being committed - mostly in travelling). Taquile
Island is the best of sparkling, horizon spanning views and the worst
of Flores and San Christobel rolled together. We walked two
kilometres around the island (and up about 200 metres) admiring the
view and being constantly hassled for money. At one point I
scratched the head of a sheep on the side of the path and an urchin
appeared to demand money for the privilege. Aside from having very
fine, extraordinarily expensive weaving, a jolly good view and an
incredibly complicated, unfathomable, communication system regarding
marital status and emotional state involving hats and pom-poms, the
island seemed to have little to recommend it. We were made to feel
that neither we, nor our money was particularly welcome, but we
should at least leave some of the latter behind.
And then, after lunch, as if revealing the extra special, surprise
bonus addition to the trip, the guide announced that returning to the
boat involved descending 540 stairs!
