Juli

After a fieldtrip at a town called Juli about 25km from where we live, where Andrés interviewed people selling Cañiwa at the market, we decided to hike up one of the hills surrounding the town. We hiked up a hill called the Sleeping Lion (León Dormido). We reached 4075m, around 200m above Juli. There was a really nice view of Lake Titicaca from the top, and of a village lying on some sort of delta, where we were told there was a large market for cocaine, before Fujimori (Peruvian president 1990-2000) partially removed it. Because of this market there are some very rich people living there. I read a book of an anthropologist who studied fishermen at Lake Titicaca, where he visited a ‘cocaine village' and was escorted from and back to the border of the village by heavily armed guards. Probably not a village we’re going to visit.