Taquile Sunset

Lake Titikaka! makes you forget the brown and grey dump that is Puno. Our little group clambered over some boats to get to ours – only to find it wouldn’t go. The ‘captain’ was trying the usual Ctrl-Alt-Del for recalcitrant vehicles – sucking (and spitting) diesel from a pipe until the engine finally started after a sweltering 30min on board.

First stop – the reed islands of Uros. The peaceful Uros went to live on the lake 1000 years ago after being pushed out by aggro Inkas and Aymaras. They built islands of reed; which is abundant in the shallows of the lake and lived isolated lives. Reeds are their livelihood (of course, there’s tourists now!) –they make islands, boats, watchtowers, houses out of them (reeds, not tourists). They even eat the fresh young shoots of the totora reeds.

The way they make their islands is quite interesting. First they find roots of reed clumps – these serve as ballast for the islands. They then strew reeds over this to form the ‘ground’ of the island. Of course, these need to be replenished fairly frequently. Its quite tricky walking on them – they’re springy and spongy! They then moor the island by way of anchors of stones tied with (guess what) reeds. They also use reed ropes through strategically placed holes in the island to assess depth of water (the equivalent of plumb lines); when to replenish the roots etc.

Each island houses between 5 and 15 families and there’s around 25 such islands. Each island also has a chief – he’s the one who showed us around. When there’s a fiesta or marriage, the islands cast off their moorings and come together to form one large island. Amazing to find them living these lives just 5km off Puno. They didn’t allow tourists in till 1995- when Fujimori offered them solar panels in exchange for letting a limited number of tourists visit them. That ‘limited’ number now translates to around 50 boats a day. Wonder how long they will survive (mea culpa too of course). We then left the Uros behind and headed 2 hours north into the Lake to Taquile (not Tequila – ha, ha – joked our guide). A nice touch – all the villagers of ‘our’ island lined up along the boat and sang a farewell song for us!

After mooring, we had a stiff 45 minute climb up to the top of Taquile and everyone was breathless (it wasn’t just me). Maybe the fact that we were at close to 4000m had something to do with it. The islanders of Taquile are famous for their weaving. In fact, the day we went, there were some Quechua ‘tourists’ from Cusco who’d come to observe Taquile weaves and weavers. The men weave their own caps – and caps are important in defining you in a society that has strict rules (“the only way to divorce here is to escape the island “ said our comedian guide). Headgear defines whether you are an elder, married, single. Even women have clothes that define their status – and even moods! For example, pompoms dangling on the left side mean “Don’t talk to me, I am not in the mood”. Its amazing how these islands, just a few km apart from each other, have their own sets of rituals, societies and even languages.

A heart-warming sight was the photo exhibition in the main square. One of those NGO groups had introduced the Taquile to photography – and they decided to use photography to catalogue their lives. And they also made some money converting some of them to postcards. They had a co-op store as well which had exquisite clothes, bags etc. I bought a finely woven scarf before the long trek down to the boat…