At the end of a busy avenue in the southern Peruvian city of Puno shines the great blue plain of Lake Titicaca. It is not a lake with wooded banks, easy fishing and sunny docks. It is a lake: rough and enormous. Half is in Peru, the other in Bolivia. Lake Titicaca was once an inland sea and it still feels like one. Not just for its size, but for the squall of overhead birds; the wide emptiness of the port, the sense of desolation that accompanies a giant body of water. It is difficult to believe that Titicaca is in the heart of the Andean Mountains, at an elevation of roughly 12,500 feet. More incredible still is the fact that indigenous peoples actually live on this lake – some on man-made islands – and have been doing so for as long as anyone can remember.
There are two natural islands near Puno: Amantani and Taquile, which have been inhabited since pre-Inca times. Close by, the famous floating island chain known as Los Uros was developed, in part, in response to the Inca expansion in the late 15th century. To avoid subjugation, some of the Uros people left land for makeshift islands on the lake.
Though the Inca empire was in turn conquered by the Spanish fewer than 100 years later, the Uros – who, over time, intermarried with the larger ethnic group Aymara – stayed on their islands. When the territories that now comprise modern-day Peru and Bolivia won independence from Spain in the 1820s, the islanders didn’t return to the mainland. By then the Uros had been living on the lake in isolation for nearly four centuries. For them, the islands were home. They still are.
‘The Heart’
I visited an island in the Uros chain and then Taquile Island in a 30-foot boat named “The Heart.” It was full of tourists, as well as Uros and Taquileños returning from the Saturday market in Puno. They had bright cloth sacks full of groceries and re-filled canisters of propane. When the boat was full our captain, Domingo, started the motor and moved her out into the lake.
The 42 floating Uros islands, five kilomters from Puno, are attached to great ropes which are staked to the lake bottom. They are made of earth and topped with a meter-thick layer of the totora plant, a reed which grows on the lake.
As the reeds rot away, new layers are added by the Aymara-speaking Uros. Anywhere from two to 10 families live on each island, most of which are not much bigger than basketball courts.
When we arrived, Domingo cut the engine and let the boat drift up against the side of a typical Uros island named Isla Native San Pedro. I stepped off the boat and the island’s reed floor sank and rolled beneath my weight; it felt like walking on a water bed, or a strange planet. “I was born here, my parents were born here, my grandparents,” said a 40-year-old San Pedro man named Juan. “Everybody, everybody. We’ve always lived here.” Juan and his wife, like the rest of the families on San Pedro, have an arts and crafts souvenir stand in front of their reed hut where they work every day of the week.
Traditionally, the Uros are a fishing people. This started changing in the mid-’80s when tourists began visiting the islands in large numbers, at the same time that the commercial fishing industry on the lake declined. “Before, everyone fished,” said a woman named Julia, who like Juan only gave her first name. “Now almost nobody remembers how to fish anymore.” Julia sat behind her souvenir stand in a black skirt, bright pink sweater and a bowler hat. Julia is the 42-year-old mother of seven. Her husband is a former fisherman. He works on a tourist boat now and earns about $80 dollars a month. “Tourism is good for us,” Julia said. “We sell a little something and have money for food, to stay warm. To educate our children. No more.”
We were interrupted by Domingo, who said his boat was leaving for its principal destination of Taquile Island. The tourists who had been shopping for souvenirs piled back onto The Heart and into its covered cabin. During the stop, the men and women returning to Taquile from the mainland had sat in the open-air stern of the boat waiting patiently and chatting in Quechua. When the boat passed out of the Uros Islands and into open water, they settled in for the long ride home.
The approach
Taquile is 34 kilometers and approximately three hours from Puno. Farther out on the lake the wind picked up and made three and four-foot waves. The only other boat on the water was another tourist vessel, identical to ours. It rode the waves several hundred yards to our left. Together we approached Taquile like the landing craft of an invading army.
The island forms a long, narrow ridge whose northern and southern slopes are divided into terraces where potatoes, onions, corn and other crops are grown. According to its inhabitants, about 400 Quechua farming families, totaling 1,000 people, live on Taquile. Though the island is more isolated than the Uros chain, its economy has also become increasingly dependant on the tourism industry.
Pedro Yucra Huatta said Taquile has developed considerably during his lifetime. Huatta, 50, is a tiny, wrinkled man with half-shut eyes and a wispy beard. Huatta, his grandson, Jaime, and I sat on mattresses in a small room in his adobe house. The beds were covered in worn fleece blankets and stood very low to the ground, which was earthen. A small television was mounted on the wall in one corner. Resting on the pillow of every bed, as if left there by the tooth fairy, were old, hand-held radios.
“Before, this island wasn’t like you see it now,” said Huatta in Quechua. His grandson Jaime translated into Spanish. “The houses weren’t built of adobe but of straw, in the custom of our ancestors. And there weren’t very many houses. Now it feels like a city.” Huatta paused. He thought. “There were few gringos. A few came every day. Now we live off tourism.” Though his family grows several crops, they spend their free time weaving textiles, which they sell to tourists at the artisan market in the town plaza. “It’s changed a lot,” said Huatta. “Before, nothing changed. Nothing, nothing.” Today, younger generations of Taquileños wear modern clothing, Huatta continued, speak Spanish as well as Quechua and are ignorant of Andean religious traditions. Jaime, who wore a baseball cap turned sideways on his head, stared at the ground as he translated quietly.
Huatta said he wants Taquile to return to the old ways – but also to grow and prosper economically. He did not say if he felt these two visions were mutually exclusive. He went on to praise tourism whole-heartedly; the more, he said, the better. Then Huatta took off his traditional cloth hat and tried to sell it to me.
“Put your hat back on, grandfather,” said Jaime. He seemed embarrassed. Jaime is 14 and loves his island, though he’s aware of a larger world beyond it. When he finishes grade school, Jaime said he hopes his parents have the money to send him to a university in Puno. He wants to be any one of five things when he grows up: a doctor, a professor, a lawyer, a scientist or a mathematician. “My dream is to have a computer,” said Jaime. “But I hear they’re very expensive.” Jaime said he might like to live in Puno someday, but would also be happy spending his life on the island. “I don’t think we’ll move to other places,” Jaime said of the Quechuas of Taquile. “There will always be people here. And if they leave, they’ll come back.”
I left Taquile that afternoon hoping to return someday. Before boarding my boat, I waited out a rainstorm in the tiny, paper-filled office of Taquile´s harbor-master, Eluutorio Flores Juasca. When Juasca, who is 43, was a few years older than Jaime – in the days before mass tourism reached Taquile – he went off to the mainland to work on a chicken farm in the coastal city of Chincha. “I needed to make money,” said Juasca. “I liked the life there but I didn’t get accustomed to it. I’m used to life here on Taquile.” Juasca spent six months working in Chincha before returning home. This has been his only trip anywhere in Peru besides Puno. Juasca said most Taquileños make a similar journey once in their lives. “People leave for Puno or sometimes Lima for a few months or a year but they always come back,” he said. I asked why they return. Juasca was silent for a long time. He shook his head. “I really don’t know.”
(Daniel Bush is a freelance writer for the Dutchess Beat)