Choose another map, showing:

• Amazon
• South America (central)
• South America
• The World

Other entries in Puno

Floating Islands and Woolly Hats

Lake Titicaca (or Titikaka, take your pick) is, at 3800 metres, the highest navigable lake in the world. What makes a lake navigable other than water is not clear, but presumably, it's gotta be big enough to bother putting a boat on it. Lake Titicaca is so big it was worth hauling a boat made in England, The Yaviri, across the Andes in pieces and assembling it on the lake.

The Lake is also home to the Uros people, who on seeing the Incas marauding towards them assembled reed raft islands and punted them into the lake and continued their lives in peace albeit with 20 metres of water below them. This trick worked against the Spanish too, meaning that the Uros way of life has stayed unchanged for hundreds of years. But the island way of life has not protected the Uros from tourists and many of us visit the islands to marvel at life on the reeds. This life appeared to involve making stuff to flog to said tourists and gathering reeds to eat and repair the home.

We also visit the island of Taquile, home to about 2,000 Taquileños. Again, the way of life is preserved, notably the method by which young men prove their worth to prospective wives and inlaws which is a knitted hat. The quality of the hat, i.e. smallness of the stitches, marks a worthy boy from a lazy one; and the normal method for testing the hat if for the proto father-in-law to fill the cap with water. Needless to say we saw a lot of young men peering at miniscule needles and wool slung around their necks, all of whom appeared to have ruined their eyesight.

Add to del.icio.us Add to reddit

Photos / videos of "Floating Islands and Woolly Hats":