The lengths people will go to...

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This may be our final blog from Peru as we head off tomorow morning for Bolivia.

First, I must apologize for the Machu Picchu blog. Im sure all you world travelled spelling savants noticed that I misspelled Machu Picchu (as Machu Pichu - egad what I disaster) throughout the entire blog. When I realized it after an hour I was MUCH too lazy to fix it. I hope I have offended no one with this and dissapointed only myself with this gaff.

Anyway...where were we. I believe Shelagh told you all about the Jungle so that must leave us with our final night in Cuzco (which ironically I still do not know how to spell as I have seen it written with both an s and a z - thank god I teach math). First of all, we went to an amazing art shop I had spotted when we were in Cuzco a week earlier. It has these prints that I love. Well, we both went in intent to blow a little coin on some art that Clinton, I think you would have greatly approved of. BUT, the one I wanted was gone!!! Shelagh bought a beautiful piece but I went home empty handed. Only to discover that another girl in my group may have bought my print. Doomed to live forever more with no art on my walls.

Then we went for dinner with our group to celebrate one girls birthday. It was fantastic. Cuzco is filled with these trendy artsy funky places. And its pretty cheap. Well, it would be if some scottish lassie didn't decide to drink moderately expensive wine at the start of the night and move on to more expensive wine as the night went on. I don't know if you caught it but I hadn't been feeling so hot so only managed one beverage (but tons of food- don't worry, I only stopped eating for a couple days on the Inca trail then went right back to gorging myself beyond all reasonableness). We went home early as we were exhausted from the previous week, but several of our group managed to hit the south american discos.

We spent all of the next day on a bus. Luckily it was a private mini bus so was quite comfortable. We stopped at the grocery store before we left and half the group bought ridiculously expensive dairy milk bars. Apparently we were suffering some sort of collective chocolate craving. There seemed to be some sort of mini parade going on in Cuzco and it seems that the way to celebrate was with lots of random military guys with assortments of large and larger and ridiculously large guns (compensating hmmm?) hanging out around grocery stores. I also bought an avocado the size of my head. Yes, I know I have a Wee Heid, but c'mon you gotta see these avocados. We saw some ruins, some alpaca, some ladies selling alpaca paraphenalia by the side of the road. You know, same old same old. Oh, we did play volleyball with a couple of local kids and a dad maybe. We were all pretty bad.

We arrived in the lovely and by that I mean horrendous town of Puno. The guide book describes it as attracting a highly disproportionate number of tourists relative to it's attractiveness, but that it does have one redeeming feature...it's on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Which brings me to...Lake Titicaca

First of all, you know of course that Lake Titicaca is the worlds highest Navigable lake. Now, there has been much discussion (started, and frankly mainly carried on, by me) about what that means. If someone could provide the answer I'd greatly appreciate it. What makes a lake navigable. Does it mean that if you have to actually Navigate, like use a compass, but couldn't you do that in any lake, or my bathtub for that matter. Does itmean that boats can go on it? But again, you can put a kayak in 8 inches of water (which again leaves my bathtub as a navigable body of water). Please someone help answer this question. Anyway, it's big and it's high up. I have no ability to remember these numbers but we're somewhere up around 4000m again.

So we head off bright and early in the morning in these little bicycle taxi things. It was great fun. We raced the others, very very nearly crashed into a much larger, heavier and faster bus (and I'm not kidding) and left our poor driver quite out of breath by the time we reached the port (I like to think it was the altitude getting to him, not my aforementioned binge eating). We then picked up supplies for a day and night and hopped on our boat.

We were off first of all to the island of Taquile. It's a beautiful island where the culture of the people has been largely untarnished (other than the requisite tourist facilities of course). There are about 2000 people living on the island and they have no police. Because it is such a tight knit community there is literally no crime. The people fish and farm and make handicrafts....but there's a twist. In this community it is the men who do the knitting. In fact they say that a man who cannot knit is not a man! It's quite funny to wander the town square and see all the men traditionally dressed (and looking quite dapper) with their knitting tucked under their arm. They sit around and gossip and knit and look quite happy. The tradition in the community is that single girls wear a shawl that covers there face and they act all shy and smile coyly. The married women wear the shawl around their shoulders and look angry. The single boys wear a certain kind of hat and the married men wear another -except when the married men wear the single man hat which presumably has something to do with the angry looks on the married women's faces. The boys and girls go to the well in the evenings, obstensively to fetch water, and the boys throw stones at the girls. If the girl is interested, she throws a rock back at the boy and so the courtship begins (in other areas near here, the boy takes a mirror and shines the sun's light in the girls eyes and vice versa). I'm going to recommend these tactics to my students because rock throwing and mirror shining can't be any more obtrusive in my classes than text messaging. Besides, eventually they have to run out of rocks. Anyway, when a couple decides they like each other, they live together for a couple of years to decide if it will work. Clever I think. If they like each other, they marry, if not, they don't. We found one little glitch in the system though, invariably after living together for a while the woman becomes pregnant, and if a couple are pregnant, they have to get married. And, there's no divorce. We had a great lunch where most people ate fresh fish from the lake (there are only 6 species of fish in lake Titicaca and two of them - trout (from canada) and kingfisher- are introduced). I of course, did not. It was quite good though. We also tried a new tea called Muna which is some sort of locally growing pepermint (it's still strange to me to have someone pick something out of the ground, put it in hot water, and I drink it). They also mix muna with the coca tea and call it Explosive. Lots of people drank it and no one reported any explosions so I'm not sure where the name comes from.

We then hopped back on our boat to head to the Island of Amantani. This is another secluded group of people who still live quite traditionally and we were to stay with them in their homes. It was a really interesting, rewarding, sad, eyeopening etc experience. The houses vary slightly but basically are only a couple of rooms. Some have some electricity (like a bare light bulb in the tourist room) some have a few more rooms etc. They are made out of mud brick (and we actually saw a house being built - all the men inthe community help out) and sometimes covered with plaster. The women meet the tourist boats and are assigned their guests. The mother of our family was quite young, I'd guess mid twenties and she showed us to the house. There are no roads on this part of the island and you just wander through fields, over stone walls etc. We passed the donkey in the field and the chickens in the yardl. Oh, she was carrying her 18month old son Fernando in a sling on her back. I made a fool of myself trying to ask her something in Quechua (the indiginous language - looking off my ''important Quechua phrases'' sheet) and she answered in Spanish. Okay, Spanish it is. Then she took us to the community soccer field (aka concrete pad) where the tourists play against the locals. Apparently the tourists have never won. Keep in mind we're in soccer heartland AND we're over 4000m. Our team actually did very well. Shelagh in fact was a star and scored the go-ahead goal. It only took a few minutes before the guys on our team realized they should pass to hear and the guys on the other team realized they should defend her. We then did a quick hike up to the top of the mountain and back to meet our families again. Oh, funny, the locals think that the tourists all look the same so the women give you a toque that they've knit so that they can recognize you later. I would have thought that they giant blond would be easy to spot, but apparently not. So, we were ushered home for dinner by the father of our family, Pepe. He seemed very nice and spoke about as much english as we speak spanish. We offered to help with dinner but were told no and so we awkwardly waited. We were then brought in for dinner in the kitchen which is a separate building, and seated at the table. However, that left no room for the family. So we sat there while they all sat in the corner, parents and 3 small children. They served us first and it all felt very awkward and uncomfortable and a major reminder of the differences between us. The food was very simple but tasty. After dinner we gave the family gifts. I think the fee for a homestay is something like $3, but it is expected that you give gifts. Everyone wants to give the kids candy, but there are no dentists (and it turns out no doctors either) on the island so toys, pencil crayons, coloring books etc are better. So, we gave the kids those sorts of things and the parents we gave rice, pasta, sugar and cooking oil. I think all together we spent about $10 on gifts, but it's substantial to them. Then we waited (again awkwardly) until they came to dress us in traditional clothing and take us to the community center for a dance. Well...FUNNY! First of all, the skirts (yups skirts, multiple - for the johnson clan kinda like emma used to wear them, layered) are flattering on no one and the sleeves are about 6 inches too long However, the work is beautiful. It is the mans job to do the embroidery and we all agreed that my shawl was the most beautiful. Then men get off easy with just a woolen poncho. Then a Andean band strikes up and the dance begins. The locals grab the tourists and everyone joins in. It's pretty simple dancing well, at least the way we did it, it looks like a cross between the jive, salsa, and the grade 8 school dance hockey puck shuffle. Except of course when they bust into a high speed conga line. It was lots of fun. We headed home and burried ourselves under 4 huge Alpaca blankets. we were warm but some others in our group froze. In the morning we woke up to the donkey braying and the chickens...chickening. They served us pancakes in our room and then we said good bye.
I haven't said much about the kids, in addition to the boy there were 3 and 5 year old girls. They were very cute, but very very dirty and very wary of strangers. They didn't speak spanish so we couldn't talk to them much, but they quite liked to see the pictures we had taken of them with our digital camera. Pepe then gave us their address so that we could send them the picture, something I really want to do. That was it, we then joined our group and took off for the next island...

The Islands of the Uros people are possibly the most amazing thing I have ever seen. A long time ago (800 years?) someone did something that made the Uros people flee to the water. That's not just me forgetting details by the way, they really don't know who was after them or why or if there was another reason. Anyway, the happy fisher people hopped in their boats and headed out into lake Titicaca...and never came back. Presumably they lived on their boats which were constructed of reeds that grow in the lake (almost exactly like the ones in Big Shell lake as a matter of fact) for a while and then decided to make things more permanent. So what they did, and still do, is find some big floating pieces of peat moss, tie them together somehow and then cover them with layers and layers of reeds. They continually replace the reeds as the bottom ones rot away the islands end up being about 2 m thinck and sit ina bout 18 m of water. Then they build houses and boats out of reeds and continue to live their lives on floating islands. They actually now anchor the islands, but they are in fact floating and as you sit on them you can see them move up and down as boat waves go by. There are about 2000 people that live on a total of about 50 islands, a few families per island. About half of them are open for tourism, the other half not. There are elementary schools on the islands and the teachers row out from Puno each day. The teenagers row to the mainland each day to attend high school. There is also a floating pontoon boat Church of Jesus Christ of later day saints (of all the things that floating island people need I'm not so sure how high on the list that is...). The reed boats they make last for about 6 months or a year before they rot away. Shelagh made sure that we got a ride in one. The Puma which is one of the indiginous gods figures highly in the culture and most boats have a puma head at the front.

In the afternoon Heather decided to chill out and I went to see some more ruins. These were funeral chambers that look like chimneys. They are all over the hillside near Puno and represent a combination of Cola (cant spell) and laterly the inca people. The towers are saped outside as a phallic symbol and the actual chamber inside is shaped like a womb. Most of the graves suffered from grave robbers, but around 5 years ago they found 3.5kg of gold near one of the larger chimneys. It was pretty cool and the area where we were had around 1000 bodies buried.

One observation on healthcare. If you dont have money´then you don't get treated. The guinea pigs and the shamens are the only option and you die on the island. Crazy in this day and age...but then there is that developed country with no universal health care coverage.

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Photos

knitting
The man in this photos wanted to see it after I shot this photo. He then described himself as muy bueno!

and she scores...
footie at 4000m is hard work

attractive peruvian chicks
first time in a skirt for a while!

floating reed islands
The uros islands are amazing...2m thick of reeds that get continually replaced.

Comments

[Lorraine]

Lake Titicaca
Hey did you know that the Bolivian Navy is stationed on Lake Titicaca? You may wonder why a land locked country would need a navy, but the Bolivians are ever hopeful that they will reclaim the land they lost 100 years ago to Chile and have an outlet to the ocean. And that is the social studies lesson for the day. Enjoyed the blog, and especially loved heather in a skirt. I think you should wear that on the first day of school!

[Richard Wilson]

Dresses
A little early for halloween, however would it not have looked like more believeable if you had been wear shorts and not pants? Your trip is amazing and you look like you are having sooo much fun.