A boat trip on Lake Titicaca

Los Uros:

While we were in Puno and Andrés was taking a relaxing day to take care of his altitude sickness, I went on a boat trip on Lake Titicaca to visit an island made completely of totora reeds. The people on these islands are called Uros, they put layers and layers of totora reeds on top of each other to make an island, and they anchor the island to the bottom of the lake, so they don’t flow to Bolivia, as they told us at their presentation of their lifestyle. Their houses and boats are made of the reeds and they eat them as well, which apparently are very healthy and cause the Uros to hardly ever become sick. 

The leader of the village presented a miniature version of their island and how it is made.

The women and children performed a song for us. 

We took a boat ride on one of their boats made of totora reeds. See how small their island is. 

They sold woven blankets which contained stories of their lives. 

The kids had summer holidays at the time. They usually go to a school on another island. 

Taquile:

Later on we went to another island calle Taquile. Now this was the day after my sunburn incident and I was still feeling the altitude. So as the sun grew stronger in the middle of the day and we had to hike to the top of the hill of the island to the restaurant where our lunch awaited, I felt the fatigue upon me. I had been a bit nervous whether I would survive this day, with sunburn, tiredness and the altitude. But the other people on the trip were so fun and friendly even though I couldn’t communicate much with them. But we still had conversations with a mixture of hand gestures, Spanish, English and French. I’m certain God blessed me that day and gave me an awesome trip in spite of it all. 

Because the Spanish chopped down many of the trees during their conquest several hundred years ago, to use in the mines, many of the original slow-growing trees have been depleted and instead mostly foreign faster-growing varieties are seen in the area. As you can see on this picture, the island is packed with Eucalyptus trees. I almost felt like ‘home’ (if I could call Australia home).