Titicaca

Copacabana :: Bolivia

Not just a funny sounding word.

Places: Puno, Uros Islands, Taquile, Copacabana & Isla del Sol.

Coolest thing I did: Watched the Cordillera Real light up at sunset with Isla del Luna in the foreground. Pity the picture has frickin' power lines in it.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: After Easy Rider Dennis Hopper made a movie in Cusco called The Last Movie that was such a flop that it made him a Hollywood pariah for somewhere over a decade.

Excuse me if this one is a bit scattered. Due to random road blockades by students/doctors/nurses/farmers (it's very hard to get an answer that doesn't seem like someone's biased opinion) no buses have managed to leave Copacabana for anywhere else in Bolivia for 3 days and that means I was relegated to the late bus when the roads finally opened, so I've been supporting the local economy by drinking beers in the sun on the shore of Lake Titicaca. I may be drunk, sunstruck or a combination of both.

As is par for the course in my travels in South America I managed to find a Nirvana cover band on my last night in Cuzco and as a result found myself fairly groggy for my bus ride to Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca when the time came to move on. I was willing to simply skip over Puno and go directly to Bolivia, however I was told it was worth doing a day there to see the floating islands of the Uros, so I found myself by late afternoon descending into what at a distance looked like a picturesque town on the shores of a gorgeous blue lake and instead found myself in a slightly tarted up slum whose sole existence is to get the last  few soles out the passing tourists before the cross the border into Bolivia. For a town that's situated on the highest navigable lake in the world, where the thin air and bright sun gives the lake an appearance like liquid saphires it defies logic that they'd try their best to keep the tourists staying in the terracotta and exposed concrete hovels up the hill and away from the lake shore. When I'm in charge, things will be different.

Puno is a town where you get on a boat and go for a day to see a couple of isolated cultures that have survived somewhat intact through a series of invasions going back to pre-Inca times. The floating islands of Uros do exactly what they say on the tin. Blessed with endless reeds in the shallow bay surrounding Puno the local people escaped their invaders by building reed islands that now resemble something of a Venice of South America. Of course, if Venice was made entirely of reeds. They start with a metre of the roots of the reeds, which hold more than their own weight when wet, then add another two metres of dry reeds, on top of which they build their houses, unsurprisingly out of reeds. They also eat reeds. If there was a sport based on finding things to do with reeds, these people would be world champions. They cook on burning reeds, but in what is probably a concession to past conflagrations they build their stoves out of clay. They are also avid non-smokers, unlike pretty much all other Bolivians, but probably for the same reason.

Tacked onto the end of the same day trip is lunch on the island of Taquile, which isn't (as some loud American college girls on the trip thought) where tequila comes from. (Come on!, these girls went to university and they still think nonsense like that...I digress). It's another indigenous refuge that has since been terraced over every surface and thanks to the Lonely Planet planting the idea in my head, is now somewhere I'm incapable of thinking of as anything different to Mediterranean. If you squint real hard you can see the Greek Islands. We had a lunch consisting of trucha (that's trout, gringo) and to a fairly embarrassing display of local customs and dancing and so forth. Am I the only one that finds these displays of nearly dead culture a little uncomfortable to watch?  I feel like the plantation master watching the native sing for their supper. But maybe that's the sunstroke talking.

So my first day in Bolivia greeted me with the most common local custom that brushes up against tourists these days: the road blockade. Bolivians love a strike, and they've discovered that road blockages are the way to get maximum impact. The bus I was on was going to La Paz via Copacabana, but on arrival to Copacabana it turns out the roads into and out of La Paz were blocked by the doctors and nurses, who were upset that they were going to be pushed to work an 8 hour day, instead of the current 6 hours. However before you judge that was just the most common of the many reasons people were speculating the roads were blocked. I also heard it was students, indigenous people (I've been recently informed in the Andes the term indio becomes offensive so I've stopped using it) protesting the building of a highway and the taxi drivers being taxi drivers. Lucky for me, my plan was to stop in Copa for a few days anyway, but today is the first day the buses are running again, so there's been people I saw on the bus two days ago finally getting out to La Paz where the hoped to be days ago.

Copa is a much nicer town than Puno, and if I only had time to do one town on the shores of Lake Titicaca this would be it. In the afternoon it faces the setting sun and the bars down on the beach are filled with Argentinian students pretending they're hippies in the 3 months they've got to grow dreadlocks before they're forced back to BA to go to Uni on they're padres' money. The poor people in Argentina aren't smoking weed on the shores of Lake Tititcaca, I'm pretty sure. Much of this is driven by the fact that the Isla del Sol was once the centre of the Inca creation myth, and as a result has sprung up all the usual mystical mumbo jumbo that goes with it - every room I've slept in for the last 3 days has been equipped with a dream catcher. I'm wondering if I could make a fortune here by starting a business based on the fact I've built a more effective dream catcher ("catches 25% more dreams or your money back!") but I suspect that's too cynical.

The Incas were a pretty smart bunch of emperors. Once they'd done conquering all the peoples of the Andes they went around co-opting the best of everything those people did, including the creation myths of the people who had previously living on the shores of Lake Titicaca. The world had been created by a mixing of Mother Earth and the Sun on the Isla del Sol, so that became the birthplace of the first Inca, and a temple was created on the north end of the island to allow the Inca to celebrate that fact, and the town of Copacabana (which the one in Brazil is named after) sprung up to support that. When you get told you're getting your boat from Copacabana beach it's a fairly different experience from doing the same thing in Rio.

You can kind of see why this happened. The Isla del Sol is beautiful. It's the peak of an underwater mountain made of tufts of grasp handing on by it's fingernails to masses of exposed rock jutting out at acute angles from the lake. I did the full circuit, spending the morning walking along the ridge tops from south to north and then winding my way back through the villages along the east coast of the island on the way back. You visit ruins that would be fairly tame had you just finished doing the Inca trail, but the piles of rocks are greatly enhanced by the perfect backdrop of cliffs plunging into perfectly blue water. The biggest highlight of staying overnight on the island was the fact the snow caps of the Cordillera Real mountain range light up pink  once the sun has gone down, with the dark expanse of the much smaller Isla del Luna in the foreground. It truly would be a magical place, even without all the hippy dippy nonsense that surrounds these kinds of places.

So I'm back in Copa now in the hope that the ticket I've been sold to La Paz is on a bus that isn't going to be cancelled due to striking teachers/doctors/environmentalists/coca growers (cross out all but one). This afternoon's bus was full due to the fact there's been people on the waiting list since Monday, but the evening bus was suspiciously empty. Hopefully the next one of these will come from La Paz, and not here where I've wasted days getting sunburnt supporting the local economy. Apparently I should do that by buying handicrafts, but I suspect they are also equally happy with money spent on beer.