The islas and goodbye to an old friend

It has been a tumultuous five days, not just for me, but for the world; I have torn myself away from Bolivia, crossed the border into Peru, visited four islands and read of a massacre of farmers in the north of the country. Gordon Brown looked as if he was going to be forced from office, he was accused of using women as "stagprops" and Roger won his first French Open against the surprise finalist, Robin Soderling, making him only the sixth man to have won all four grand slam titles and equalling Pete Sampras´s astounding tally of fourteen majors.

After spending a day in La Paz and being treated like scum at an Israeli restaurant, I boarded a bus in the frenetic, dirty city of El Alto towards Lake Titicaca. As we left La Paz, the landscape quickly changed, the tall buildings and suffocating fumes of the capital giving way to flat, light brown countryside stretching off to my right towards rippling, snow-capped mountains. Wheat and barley is grown in this area, just as it was under the Tiwanaku culture which began as early as 1500BC. The shores of the lake, and the islands that dot it, ripple with hundreds of uniform terraces that are either Inca or Pre Inca and are used to prevent soil erosion and to allow farming on steep hillsides. My first view of the lake was spectacular. As we rounded a bend, a vast expanse of water lurched into view, made all the more picturesque by the countryside that surrounded it. A light wind rustled the surface of the water, but in the lee of the islands, the water looked like a mirror, creating sweeping bands of dark blue and blinding cristal. The name, Lake Titicaca is believed to come from the Aymara language. "Titi" means Puma (a sacred beast) and Kaka, grey (important to distinguish from the Spanish which means "shit"). I also read on Wikipedia that the lake is supposed to resemble a darting Puma.

Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) was my first destination, a mass of rock resembling an octopus that is reputed to be the birthplace of the Inca sungod and the first Inca emperor, Manco Capac. He is said to have emerged from an outcrop of rock that is now called "titikala", or "roca sagrada". Next to this rock lies a sacrificial table where offerings were made to the gods and a little further from Inca ruins that resemble the dry stone walls of Yorkshire. I visited this "laberinto" (laberyinth) on my second day on the island and had to crouch down to fit through the succession of four foot doors that led from one small room to another and eventually ended in a dead end.

Once you pass the steet sellers and women forcing you to buy a pass of entry to the island, you discover a land of strange contrasts that has changed little in some areas since the time of Manco Capac. From the dock, I laboured up some moss-grown Inca steps that climb up the hillside and ate the local speciality, trout, in a low, rustic restaurant that overlooked the wide, sparkling bay. A string of snow capped mountains could be seen distinctly through the thin, limpid air. Once I had gained the height of hillside, fending off the approaches of street sellers, I walked south down the spine of the island amidst some of the most beautiful countryside that I have seen in South America. Because so little rain falls each year, the villagers plow their meagre terraces by hand and plant it with wheat, barley and other cereal crops that shined in the sun and created a patchwork of contrasting coloured plots that cascaded down the hillside towards the water below. As I walked, breathing hard in the mountain air, I saw women with billowing, voluminous dresses and dark shawls ushering sheep this way and that on barren slopes. They carried wooden switches that they would use when the sheep dared to disobey. Large spits of land descend into the water, tapering to join Inca ruins that now lie below the surface of the water (the water level was once much lower than it is now). As I ascended a small hillock, I passed a huge, fat American woman who was being followed by her "guide", a tiny, emaciated boy who could have been no older than seven or eight. He bent under the weight of her heavy bag, but seemed to be faring better than his charge who seemed to be at the point of capitulating to the thin air. Her swinging posterior was eventually lost in the distance.

I stayed that night in the village of Challapampa which sits in a cradle of land between the mainland and a spit in the north-east of the island. I had rushed to reach the village before dark fell and was rewarded with a view of pigs grazing in the fading light and children playing a variant of marbles with plastic bottle tops. As I sat on rock, overlooking the bay, a young girl tried to make me pay for taking a picture of her cow. Luckily, there was electricity that night, but when I ventured out for dinner, the dusty streets were deserted and the signs outside dwellings, reading "restaurante" and "comedor" seemed to mock me, for there was no light inside. In a narrow sidestreet off the main drag, a feeble light glowed in the blackness, beckoning me into a low room, which I first saw through a chink in the two doors. Sitting at a table were Hector and Paddy, the two lads from Leeds who used to play for Horsforth Dynamoes and whom I had previously bumped into in Puerto Natales (Patagonia) and Salta (northern Argentina). I sat down for a beer and a fat trout. Maybe there is a God.

On the way back from Isla del Sol to the mainland, I met David, and Englishman from Telford who attended Cambridge as a post-graduate. He let slip that he was glad that he hadn´t studied at Cambridge as an undergraduate and had to backtrack swiftly when I told him of my situation. We decided to visit the three island of Uros, Amantani and Taquile, but that first meant crossing the border to Puno and saying goodbye to my beloved Bolivia.

The country has treated me very well. It is a land of great natural beauty and the people are as friendly as any I have encountered in South America. Yet they labour under the injustices commited to them in the past; a naval sign on the wall in Copacabana proclaimed that Bolivia has a right to a sea port and that it should be a priority of the government to reclaim it from Chile (It was lost in the War of the Pacific). The day I left, the people of Uyuni began a six day strike to protest against the government´s decision not to pave the roads to and from Uyuni. Transport in and out of the town was blockaded and when some tourist tried to escape with a bribed taxi driver, a crowd surrounded his car and slashed the tires.

We had been told that Puno was a "shithole" and so we were pleasantly surprised when we found some great bakeries and some pool halls, despite the stinking green water around the dock. After playing some pool amidst drunk locals who sporadically broke into violence, we departed for the "Uros" islands, over thirty floating islands constructed of totora reeds, which sit a few kilometres from Puno. They are hidden in the reeds like a secret community. Some people believe that the Uros people were descendent of Polynesians, and they once spoke their own distinct language, Uro, before it was gradually replaced by the Aymara language. (the last Uro speaker died in the 50s). The Uro people fled to these islands in order to escape Incan contamination of their culture. As we approached the island, we were mobbed by women who greeted us in their local language, and we replied by saying "Wakili", hello. The reed islands rest on a base of roots that release a gas as they decompose, helping to keep them afloat. The reeds, however, have to be continually replaced, an arduous chore that falls to the women as the men go off fishing. All the buildings are also made of reeds and the women wear huge, colourful dresses and sell souvenirs from low stalls. The islands are a self-contained community, containing a school and a basic medical centre. A low women with a stoop told me that the people here prefer to cure their ailments with the plants that they grow in rectangular, upraised plots, not surprising in a country of curanderos (shamans or healers). The small girls wear a bell shaped hat coloured white, green and pink that is said to resemble the national flower of Peru, the Kantuta. All the small children stared at us inquisitively from uinder their broad-brimmed hats, hiding the terrible sunburn that blotched their smooth skin.

After an hour or two there, we travelled on to Amantani, a small, barren island where we would stay in the adobe house of a local, single mother called Maria. Her son was a tiny, smiling cutie called Roy and he had a sister called Luz. Maria was outwardly friendly, laughing at almost anything we said, but it was a laughter borne of loneliness and insecurity. She never told us what had happened to her husband. We were served eggs and quinoa soup in a low kitchen whose walls had grown black from the smoke of an open fire which was used for cooking. Maria would bustle round us and also attend to her three children and her mother, who spoke only Quechua. That night, we were draped in a poncho and Andean hat and led through the moonlight to the town hall where we participated in Andean dancing. It involved little more than locking hands with our respective hosts, rocking the shoulders back and forth and then being led in a long, winding snake. The women wore white blouses and black shawls and tucked their bulging stomachs under tight corsets which led down to pink dresses that twirled around as they danced. It was a relatively tame affair and by half past ten, we brushing our teeth in the light of a lone, guttering candle.

Our last stop was the island of Taquile which lies to the south of Amantani. As on the other islands, draught power is not used on Taquile because there is not enough pasture to support horeses and cows. The island is famed for its tight-knit textiles and the men a sombre outfit of black trousers and white shirt with black waistcoat. They also wear bright hats though, whose colour varies depending on whether they are married. A red hat means that a man is married, red mixed with white denotes that the man is single. Single men are expected to knit their own hats and their suitability as marriage partners depends on their skill at knitting and fishing. Traditionally, fathers judged their daughters´marriage partners by holding one of their hats above the sea and filling it with water. If the water seeped through the wool or alpaca, the man was considered unfit to marry the daughter. Once a man has decided to marry a woman, he must live with her for a trial period of one year because their is no divorce on the island. It is called the "watching" time. If the couple subsequently split, they must travel to the mainland to find another partner because they are considered "sullied". Jane Austen could have lived on Taquile. And so, our heads buzzing with all this information, we sat down on a rooftop terrace that overlooked the sea to enjoy a lunch of steamed fish mixed with onions and cumin seeds. Quite the life...