Lake Titicaca

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Ben

From La Paz we went to Copacabana (not the world-famous Brazilian one, the small Bolivian one), which is on the coast of Lake Titicaca. Apart from being a stopping off point to the lake, Copacabana also has a Moorish style cathedral with some beautiful tiling. It also has a chapel where people go to make wishes - by lighting candles and grafiti'ing in wax- (Amy: most unusual chapel I´ve ever seen). Lots of wishes for money and cars, none for world peace (although I suppose that could have been some of the more impressionistic blobs of wax).

We spent a night on the Isle del Sol (sunny) (Amy: and really really beautiful), seeing some Inca and pre-Inca ruins. Not that exciting but it plays a major part in Inca mythology - it´s one of the places the first Inca is meant to have come from ( Amy: I think we have our legends mixed up, but not to worry, this can be a new one).

Our lakeside jaunt continued in Peru, via Puno, with a tour onto the other side of the lake:
Our first stop was the Uros islands; completely artifical floating islands made from reeds. Despite being incredibly touristy (which I think is great - they clearly want tourists there - and there is another set of floating islands where tourists aren´t welcome) it was really interesting. The island chiefs (each of one of the 40 or so islands) stay in power for only 3 months although they now have a democratically elected mayor (as of last year). The famous reed watch towers (originally used defensively - the islands could be moved away from threats) are now largely there for tourists, but also still serve as a way of summoning everyone together for meetings. The sheer number of islands is interesting - apparantly there used to be far less but they keep on being split (literally with a saw) because apparantly large family groups are hard to manage.

We then spent the night on Amantaní with a local family. Again a great experience, we even managed a little bit of chat in Spanish. The people on Amantaní are very quiet (you can see why - the island itself is so quiet), but very friendly. We had a traditional dance in the village hall, very similar in many ways to barn dancing. I got a little tangled up in my poncho several times (Amy: amusing, very! Although I wasn´t that good at the vigorous dancing either in basically a tight corset and shawl- we must have looked great!).

The second day of the trip was spent on Taquile. It was astounding how three seperate cultures could have survived in such close proximity but they have. Apparantly though the introduction of school created a serious (but short lived) in-breeding problem. Before there was school children would be at work with their parents, but school brought them into contact with each other with obvious results. Apparently now the problem has been sorted with a big register of relations. Marriage is taken serieously there - usually it takes about 10 years to save for the ceremony with the standard amount of guests being 400 and the celebrations lasting days. People also co-habit two years before commiting (just to check, with no repercussions if they split up after 2 years), so most people get married pretty late. The religion is Catholic (as it is almost everywhere in Bolivia/Peru, but it has fused with local pre-Catholic religions).

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