lake titikaka…wow

It’s weird to visit a place that, as a child, I’d read about with fascination in National Geographic.  And now, for the last week, I’ve been walking along the shores (for the most part, the road sometimes darts inland for stretches) of Lake Titikaka, in both Bolivia and now Perú. 

The soil near the shores is fertile and the landscape is riddled with little mud homes, the tin roofs twinkling in the distance like so many broken bits of glass.  Each family plows and plants any number of acre-sized parcels of land in the area.  There are almost no fences and the plowed and fallow areas seem haphazardly laid out.  Sometimes a strip of land 200 feet long and only 5 wide is ripe with wheat, sometimes an amoeba shaped plot on a steep hillside is green with potato plants, in other areas, strips of quinua (a local grain) in all their yellows and bruised-purples, grow alongside the vivid-green of bean plants, which neighbor the wispy stems of barley, creating van goghesque stripes and textures across the plains. 

Each family also raises a handful of cows, some sheep, and  pigs that spend their days either rooting and grunting through the soil, or dead-to-the-world in muddy puddles of water.

Every few hundred feet, it seems, a woman or young girl is sitting on her skirts, resting, or loping along, shooing and ushering small flocks of sheep in search of fresh grass. 

Further along into Perú, weird slick-rock features line the shore, massaged into wild forms by long ago caresses of water and waves.  There are homes even here, molded onto ledges and platforms, hemmed in by stone terraces.  On the shores, as the beds of the tule reed, totora, begin to manifest themselves, all the available surfaces of land are covered in fan-like patterns of drying reed, to be used later as fodder for livestock.  Graceful multi-colored skiffs lie, half-beached on the shore.  And always, to my right, like a strip of sheet metal laid out just under the horizon, sits Lake Titikaka.

It’s the largest lake in South America, and also the world’s highest navigable body of water (for commercial vessels).  It covers about 3,300 square miles and at it’s deepest point bottoms out at 810 feet. 

The origin of the name is disputed, with two intriguing theories leading the way…one that it means rock puma and the other meaning gray puma…what’s intriguing is that satellite images of the lake show what looks like a puma (although a pretty deformed one, poor thing) chasing what could be a rabbit (vizcacha, actually…like a cross between a rabbit and a rat)…and the color of the water?  grey…now, the question that arises is…how in the hell could a pre-flight, for that matter a pre-wheel civilization know that  this massive friggin lake has the shape of a deformed grey puma?  Tie that in with the creepy Nazca lines, (drawings that sometimes take up MILES of space, of hummingbirds and other animals scrawled on the land of Southern Perú by clearing rocks to expose the brighter soil) and one has to wonder…did these folks have some serious hops, to be able to get a perspective from above or were they aided by some friendly E.T.s who happened to be in the neighborhood at the time?  Call Mulder!  Call Scully!

anyway…

Man, first seeing it gave me goosebumps, even though I only saw a little, slender bay.  It’s the home of so much of South America’s history and legend.  The mighty Inca Empire revered it, believing in its mythology that Manco Capac, the legendary founder of the empire, was born in its depths, pulled to the surface by the sun god Inti.  That would make it about as sacred as, say, Crater Lake would be if christian docterine stated that Jesus was yanked out of that lake by God herself.

Many distinct, tiny tribes lived along the shores of titikaka in ancient times, and almost all were wiped out by the aggressive, warlike Incas and the Aymara, too.  One tribe, the Uros Indians, a tribe of adept fishermen and hunters of waterfowl, fled out onto the lake itself.

They took the porous, buoyant rootballs of a lake reed called Totora and laid upon them many layers of the reed stems themselves until they created small, floating islands.  They later anchored these masses to the bottom of the lake with reed rope and stakes.  There, hidden from the Incas among the vast beds of totora, they lived their lives.  Every 15 days or so adding new layers of reed on top of older ones as the plant rotted quickly under water.  Their entire lives depended on these versetile plants.  Their homes were woven from the dried reeds, as were their beds, clothes, boats, nets, decorations, containers, and sails.  They ate the tender bottoms of the reeds, receiving much needed fiber and iodine from them.  They used the dried stems of the plant as cooking fuel, building fires on small platforms of stones.  And they hunted the waterfowl that made the vast stretches of totora their homes: ducks, ibis, geese, and many other birds, over 80 species in all.  Children foraged among the slender plants for bird’s eggs and a small fish. The carachi, a small perch-like fish was to be found swimming through the labyrinths of totora.

And then those blasted Spanish arrived.  When they found gold and silver in them thar hills, they instituted a form of slavery called la mita minera, wherein people from all over bolivia were forcibly moved to mining centers, the men to work till their deaths in the dark tunnels and the women and children to starve and pine away their lives huddled at the feet of the mountains.

The Spanish, seeing the nearly naked Uros living on floating islands, could scarcely believe that they were human and as a result, when swinging by to collect more miners, they always took 2 Uros, 1 Inca, and 1 Aymara, in the belief that the Uros were more expendable.

And the years passed, and the Uros, decimated by la mita and by droughts on the lake, began to disperse, intermarrying with the Aymara and the Quechua.  Finally, in 1959, the last pure-blooded Uros, an old woman, died…and with her perished the Uros language as well.

Today, there are two groups of floating islands still in existence on the lake, each containing about 30-40 islands.  Somewhere near 3,000 people live on those large, undulating rafts of reeds, descendants of the Uros, alongside Aymara and Quechua peoples. 

They still practice the traditional way of life of the Uros…with a twist.  Now that the islands are such a huge tourist attraction, the majority of the islanders dedicate their time to making handicrafts from the totora reeds to sell to the wobbly-kneed gringos who lurch around their homelands.

And some day, when the pressures and temptations of modern society overcome them, the last of these people will step onto solid ground and the floating islands of the Uros will become mere folk tales.