Day 9: Puno, in which I take to the water
After a decidedly chilly night at the hotel, we had breakfast and headed out down the hill towards the harbour where our boat was waiting to take us out onto the lake.
As has been the case throughout the trip so far, the weather was both glorious and taken for granted: a blue sky only likely streaked with clouds hung over us as we set out across the sea-like lake.
Our first destination was to be one of the famous ‘floating islands’ that have become one of Lake Titicaca’s main attractions. As on previous occasions, I found myself conflicted by our interaction with the community. As we journeyed out across the water, our guide for the day explained that we would be taken to one of the islands further from Puno as those nearer the shore were ingenuine, inhabited by peoples who went to the city at night to sleep. He also told us that the communities had only been building and living on these islands since the 1940s, and that the community we would be meeting with relied entirely on tourism to support their way of life.
I liked the people of the floating island just as much as I’d liked the previous indigenous communities that we’d met with. They were welcoming and polite, although even as their leader demonstrated to us their skilfulness in constructing the island from the reeds, all around us the other island inhabitants were setting up their stalls loading with all manner of handicrafts for us to peruse. For a fee, they took us for a ride around the island in a boat that they freely admittedly was designed and created purely for the purpose of catering to tourists, which caused my mind to return to the earlier commentary around the islands closer to shore being viewed as ingenuine. From the boat, it was possible to see many other nearly identical islands, all being visited by tour groups in day boats like ours, and even before we left our island, another tour group had arrived and was being given the same talk and paraded around the same handicraft stalls. There was no denying the skill and loveliness of the island’s construction and the likability of its people, but it was difficult to truly feel endeared towards a way of life that relied so exclusively and so brazenly on tourism as an income source.
As we left, our guide asked happily if we would like to stay on the island forever. One of my travel companions, no doubt thinking of the insular claustrophobia of inhabited an island containing only three families, mumbled under her breath, ‘not even for a few hours.’
After the fascinating visit to the floating island, we visited Taquile for lunch, another island but this time much more reminiscent of the Mediterranean, a comparison that the guide had made earlier and I had laughed, before I saw the island and found myself agreeing entirely.
After lunch on the island, we sailed out to the depths of the lake and there was an opportunity to jump in, which I of course took, hyperventilating briefly in the freezing cold water before inelegantly pulling myself back on the back of the boat. I might have jumped in again, only I had no confident that the climbing back aboard was a feat that I was capable of repeating.
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