Peru Journal, Santa Rosa de Amantani, Lake Titicaca

8/20? no date: At the weaving co-op I tied friendship bracelets on to the slender wrists of the gaggle of young girls that clustered around us. The old woman dressed me in a vest and traditional hat. The hat, nearly flat with flowers embroidered on it, was an extraordinary affair. 

Too bad the vest was uneven, I might have bought it, but we already bought so many things yesterday I didn’t want to load up on more things that I really didn’t want. They greeted us like old friends after yesterday‘s purchases. The women taking interest in who buys what since this is a co-op.

Being on this island is like stepping back in time. No cars, no roads, just cobbled paths.

Sunset, a desert lake the size of an inland sea, but at 12,000 feet from sea level. With the setting sun comes the chill of being at 12,000 feet. The lake is an aqua gray, with its skin fluxed into patterns by the complex winds. I keep looking for seals, it looks so much like the ocean. 

Last night a surprise rain played on the galvanized roof. The adobes all sport new roofs, new economy comes to the island via the tourists. The separate kitchen still have the thatch reed roofs. Five girls dressed in full skirts of red and green, rush to the kitchen of the house where we are staying. 

Children playing fútbol, soccer in an empty field. A baby is crying, the mother exclaims in Quechua. A woman in a full red skirt and black mantilla borrows something from her neighbor. She hurries to the kitchen with a white bucket and the cuy, the guinea pigs whistle an alarm call, and scuttle to safety into their stone abodes beneath the hearth. Dinner cooks in earthenware pots, full round ollas, blackened from dung and charcoal fires. 

We spent the day hiking up to the ruins at the top of the paps, twin volcanos of Pachamama, which has both a pyramid and round amphitheater, and then we hike over to the crest of the next volcano, Pachatata with a square temple. Both have niches and little cuy houses under the hearths. Interesting little locked doors. There are shallow tunnels beneath these doors reinforced with hinges and padlocks. Wonder what is stored in them?

There is evidence of earlier fires. The multitudes of stone arches, like portals to other worlds, are dressed with dried flowers. Apparently we’ve just missed an important ceremony.

But for the most part, the Incas have abandoned the top of this island, especially Pachatata. The terraces below us yield bright gardens of maize, and wheat stubble. Harvest festival? At Pachamama, stone cutters still divide the stones with crowbars and hammers looking for a clear stone to hew. We learn the volcanic rocks don’t make good corners.

In the pueblo of Santa Rosa, close to the lake, life is lived in the same fashion it has been for thousands of years. Tiny misshapen two-story dark houses, often windowless, tiny beds. Generations have lived here.

It is said the sun god, the Inti was born on an island not far from here. The Incas claimed this place as their ancestral home. Either that, or an older culture was settled here and the Incas took over, or this place is the birth place of the builders of Machu Picchu.

Much of this was used in my article for The Paper. 

• Amantani, Lake Titicaca, Peru

Note bene: There was a round altar on one of the volcanoes, and on the other there was a square altar, and enclosure on Amantani. I asked one of the women and she said, as she padded both my breasts, PachaMama, y PachaTata! I was blessed in this way. 

Tara Edna Miller from Colorado who lives part time on Taquile, and imports weaving, said, Yes, Amantani has two high points with ceremonial sites. Taquile has more than one ceremonial enclosure, but Mulcina is the high point and makes a triad with PatchaTata on Amantani and Auki Karu on the Capachica peninsula.

Perú journal, Amantani (a lot of this was used in an article)

The Puno train station along with Arequipa, is considered to be the most dangerous train station in Peru. For thievery, especially in the evening and early morning hours. I found the best result is to play bumper cars with my backpack. Anyone that comes to near to me gets bashed by my backpack, with a quick twist of my body. It makes for a  an interesting kind of walk, twisting and turning like that. Monty Pythonesque.

The boat to Puno was excruciatingly slow and all the tourists are on top of the curved roof so it rolls from side ato side as well threatening to capsize. One can see the huge snowcapped Cordillera Real of Bolivia from Taquile. The islands of the sun and the moon visible from the Bolivian border, are small dots on the horizon. It is said that the first Inca was born there, it is also the birthplace of the sun. 

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On the island, our host asked us if we are ready to eat. He use the term papaer instead of comer which gave us a clue as to what to expect by way of cuisine. Wise papas, potatoes for lunch, and more potatoes for dinner with rice. One should bring cook technology to these islands. 

We were reduced to adding bleach to our coffee, which we had brought, luckily. The local maté, muña seems to be a type of pennyroyal. Villem brought us a handful at each meal and soon our table was covered with bushes. Not much in the way of plant life survives the appetites of merino sheep.

John found a sheep in the kitchen this morning when he went to check on the progress of our hot water. After finding black hairs in my mug I resorted to using bleach in my coffee, but a sheep in the kitchen was too much.

I keep thinking of the cultural connections between unrelated cultures. The hanging gardens of the Irish, the fir bolg who carried bags of soil, the Irish word sounding like Guatemala. All the terraces here are on 45° angle slopes. Though the pueblo of Santa Rosa de Amantani was founded 20 years ago, the Indians still live a similar lifestyle untouched by the coming of white man or Christianity. There is no electricity, no hot water. No windmills.They gather their water from the ditches—it’s a communal system. There was also no litter, none of the usual toilet paper and plastics of Perú

The modern touches include wooden boats with engines and a chainsaw. One could hear it from various parts of the island during our outings. We imagined it to be a communal chainsaw. One boy with a ghetto blaster playing Quechua music took us aback.

At the school John gave a little discurso, a speech to the fourth grade class on his school in California. We estimate that the number of kindergarten through sixth graders to be about 210 kids. There is also Colegio for 7th to 12th graders as well. Most kids probably don’t continue schooling after the sixth grade.

The teachers are from Puno and the kids attend school from Monday through Thursday, a four day school week. Imagine the teachers are quick to head back to Punahou for their three-day holiday. The school seems to be open year-round. There is no summer vacation on the equator apparently. The teachers use a lot of rote teaching methods. The children sing us a song in Quechua and we imagined it to be an anthem of sorts. They then sing a list of all the countries in south and central America. Goosebumps rays on my arms when they say Guatemala. One hears the sound Ari a lot in Quechua speech. Ari means yes, but in Aymara, it means peak. In Irish it means God. 

Villem takes us to the boat on a different path, the low road. People genuinely greet you with warm here. They tend to greet both of us individually, not as a couple, so there’s always a double buenos dias with an echo. Like the women of Yucatán these women here genuinely smile upon us, not like the hostility that greets us most places we go.

Señor Bernardo C., our host, says there are nearly 4000 people on the island between the two villages. I suppose it is possible. I would say it’s probably closer to 1500 each. Certainly there were more sheep than people on this island.

Diminutive merino sheep clogging the pads as their shepherdess is guide them to forage among the upper terraces. There is a commute rush-hour of sheep. One can’t help but touch the tiny babies as they trot by on delicate legs. The rams with their curled double horns that stick out like devil horns, are the size of a springer spaniels. The sheep must be genetically similar to the first sheep brought by the Spanish, being isolated for so long.

No more alpaca on this island, there is barely enough for the sheep to eat. They remind me of the Navajo sheep with their double horns, but the sheep are very docile. The short furry pigs intermingle and blend in with the sheep. I wonder if they know they’re a separate species? Evidence in the form of a litter suggest that they do know that they are indeed pigs, not sheep.

Amantani, Lake Titicaca, Peru (article)

AMANTANI, LAKE TITICACA, PERU     8/17/88              

In the heart of the Peruvian Andes, Lake Titicaca, a deep blue inland sea intersticed with umber and sienna, reflects the sky and desert hills surrounding Puno with a vengeance. Horizons shimmer with lapis lazuli luminescence—the refractive quality of light on the altiplano so different at this great height.

An Indian in our boat plays a thin, atonal melody over and over with his quena flute, a bamboo penny whistle. "No, he corrects me, "it’s a piruru.—carved from a condor’s wing feather shaft  My perception begins to waver as he repeats the simple notes over and over. Or maybe it’s the thin air above 12,500 feet that’s affecting me.  

A channel wends along a wall of reeds; miles and miles of reeds; serpentine hissing, like pines in a high wind. Small mats of vegetation, algae and lakeweed carpets undulate, and constellations of bubbles escape from the shallow floor.

Uros fisherman

As we approach the land of the Uros nation—floating reed islands—giant Andean coots honk and scuttle among fallen tortoras. Ripples divide an Andean gull’s reflection  into four parts, a broken mirror, the four corners of the earth. “Reeds tied together in a clump mark the edges of the channel,” says the old boatman in halting Spanish, as he polled the reed boat with slow measured movements. Tortoras—everything, even the floating islands are made from the tall reed. We debark onto a bowed wooden plank. The islands make a rollicking motion beneath our feet, like walking on a huge waterbed.  

An Uros fisherman, perhaps the village idiot, repeatedly shakes our hands, pats our shoulders and peels a reed for me to eat. He strips off the outer bark and hands it to me, “Para comer,” he says, with a decayed smile, “Eat.” And stares. I hesitate, hoping that the reed has filtered the raw sewage pouring from the open gutters of Puno—a desperate town if ever there was one. It tastes mallowy, of dank, white underbelly, like the insides of the river elder stem.

A tethered pig roots and squeals when I approach. Uros is a landless nation. Soon, the pig will root his way through the island and drown!  Grubby children sell replicas of reed boats. The women hawk crudely embroidered wall hangings. We buy nothing and feel saddened by the children begging, it’s much worse here than in Cuzco.

At least in Cuzco, home to more than 3,000 street children, there are more tourists to beg and steal from. We escape to the boat, it becomes a refuge from this poverty and bleakest of lives. We have no words in Aymara to say hello, goodbye or sorrow, for that matter.

I watch the young ones play at the water’s edge; they are like children anywhere. A rotting reed boat with someone’s bundled manta inside, plastic litter, a charcoal brazier—pathetic remnants of a way of life that’s no longer viable. Soon, they will be all gone.

The Uros language is all but lost. Most Uros islanders have intermarried with the Aymara Indians. Anthropologists speculate that like the Pomos of Northern California, where I'm from, the Uros are among the oldest native peoples in South America. Persecuted by the Incas and by the Colla Aymaras for centuries on end, they took to hiding in the reeds. This way of life among the reeds became their culture—like that of the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. 

We bear witness to the last breath of a dying nation that so vividly captured the 1950s imagination of my youth. The Lake Titicaca of my dreams held vast ornate cities and large floating islands—not these small barren straw bale outposts of civilization, if you could call it that  More like subsistence survival.  Where were the big-breasted women in grass skirts posing in reed boats I'd seen in back issues of National Geographic?

Santa Rosa de Amanti, the place where the falcon rests, Google maps.

We head for the island of Amantani because the boat happened to be going there to drop off the mail and supplies, our original destination was the more populous island of Taquile but there was no scheduled boat. It’s a grueling four-hour boat ride to Amantani and onto yet another culture. This is the seat of the Quechua Incas, the Inca conquerors who built the fabled stone cities we'd made pilgrimage to: Machu Picchu, P’isac, and Sajacmarca.

Lake Titicaca is a desert lake the size of an inland sea situated more than two miles above sea level. I keep looking for seals and test the air for the familiar salt tang. It smells more of the earth, dank cellars or moldy grain.

The barefoot men of Amantani wear thick black wool pants, white billowy shirts and vests, knitted hats with long tassels and earflaps. There is such rivalry between the island people of Amantani and Taquile, they won’t even intermarry. I imagine a Quechua version of Romeo and Juliet set in the weaving and textile capital of the Andes. The indio says “Amantani  es mejor. Hay muchas ruinas” He tells us the island of Taquile has none...

But later I find out that the island of Taquile, the more popular tourist destination, too, has many ruins. I am saddened by the boatman’s zealous misinformation. When will I ever have the opportunity to come here again to bear witness to this place? 

These ancient cultures we seek are swiftly dying from the vicissitudes of tourism. We too are part of the problem, but our varied and sullen art helps us document what we see. I am traveling to the underbelly of the world with my boyfriend, poet and translator, John Oliver Simon—we are on a quest in search of the poets of South America.. This is a side trip. Kavafy's Journey, not the destination.

Small trout and gorgeous large, gold-headed fish swim among the aquatic plants. I sense the movement of something large under the water—what loch monster lives in these depths? The suche, the world’s largest freshwater fish, lives here along with sweet water mackerel, or the pejerrey. Are they truly mackerel? or are we having a cross cultural linguistic conundrum? How did ocean-going fish get into this lake two miles above sea level? If they're really mackerel, an ancient lake, or perhaps even a sea, Titicaca must have risen up from the sea floor with the Andes themselves. The trout were introduced.

“We use small nets, fishing only at night, we fish under a full moon or at dawn—and still we catch nothing,” says a fisherman. “The water’s too deep and cold here. There is better fishing there among the reeds.” This highest navigable lake, as all the guidebooks proclaim, is the largest navigable lake above 2,000 meters in the world. Higher than Lake Victoria. Bernardo O'Higgins launched his dream of the Chilean Navy from here.

Vital statistics in feet or meters mean little to me. I have to experience it though my senses. At nearly 12,600  ft. above sea level, Lake Titicaca, with its 36 islands, not counting the artificial islands of the Uros, is 105 miles long. We’re in open water, buffeted by offshore winds. An incongruous red lateen-rigged sailboat on a long reach makes it seem like we’re in Egypt instead of Peru.

The fisherman talks of the fierce winter storms that ravage this place and how huge waves mercilessly pound the shore. We watch the steamship from Bolivia belch thick black ropes into the painfully thin blue air.  No place for pollution to go in a fragile ecosystem perched at the ceiling of the sky.

The volcanic island of Amantani looms up, like terraced breasts. We manage a rocky beach landing and crawl up from the rocks like antediluvian ancestral ooze over terraces of bright green corn sprouting up like bamboo forests, and eucalyptus. We climb over tilled deep red earth and stone fences, panting from the altitude. No roads, not even a path. No horses, no carts, no automobiles.

We gringos are assigned to a family for the night. The island swallows us up like darkness. I spray our tortora reed bed and blankets with bug spray for fleas. They are busily feeding on my ankles. We take refuge on the wicker bed. But the bed’s so short, we have to sleep diagonally. The local maté, muña works a a flea deterrent.

The outhouse on the cliff, with its raised (Middle Eastern) foot-rests, has a great view of the sunset across the lake. All the terraces are sloped at a 45-degree angle. Though the village of Santa Rosa de Amantani was founded only 20 years ago, the Quechua Incas still live a an ancient lifestyle untouched by the coming of white or mestizo cultures.

Amantani’s whole, like the town of Otavalo in the Ecuadorian highlands. No disease of dominant Euro-culture demanding conformity, has encroached. The thread of craft and pride are unbroken. No electricity, no hot water. Communal water from the ditches. No litter! No usual toilet paper and the ubiquitous plastic, in pink and blue, that is so much a part of Peru.

Children play fúbol in an empty field. Rock arches everywhere. Magical doorways frame lake and sky at every turn. Adobe, brown on brown. A baby cries, its mother exclaims over it in Quechua. I gasp. It literally hurts to breathe up here.