Chapter 1: Lake Titicaca
Our first glimpse of Lake Titicaca was from the dock in Puno, Peru, where we had arrived in a taxi from Cuzco after an all night drive. There had been six of us squeezed into the unheated car, and while the others wrapped themselves against the cold and tried to sleep, I had sat wide awake, peering out the window as we made our way through the mountains and into a broad valley. All the little towns and villages we went through were silent and locked up tight as for hours we sped along, a lonely speck with its plume of dust, down the wide, empty, and almost treeless valley. I could see the snow-patched Andes gleaming in the starlight far off to the left. This was the valley down which the Inca Lloque Yupanqui had marched his army 800 years before, from the heights of Vilcanota to Lake Titicaca to begin his conquest of the Collasuyo, or what is now known as Bolivia.
We had been assured by every travel expert in Cuzco that the lake steamer to Bolivia would be waiting for us when we arrived, but there was no ship floating in the dark waters of the little harbor. The manager of the cafe where we sat in the sun, defrosting ourselves with hot chocolate, merely shrugged his shoulders and said, “What would they know in Cuzco? The boat leaves when the trains from Arequipa and Cuzco arrive. Probably tomorrow night.”
Puno was a small, sprawling, unattractive town. Lily and I did not relish the thought of spending two days there, especially as we were counting the days and also counting our money. After discussing our situation with some French tourists who had just come from La Paz, we took a bus along the south shore of the lake. The driver guaranteed that we would reach the Bolivian border well before evening.
The bus was little bigger than a Volkswagen van. An official notice declared that it could take sixteen passengers, but that was a mere formality. There were at least twenty adults and numerous babies squashed into it, with folding seats blocking the aisle, which made it quite claustrophobic, although we had sideways seats, so at least we had knee room. All the passengers were Indians, with most of the women wearing the distinctive black bowler hats, long double braids, and heavy layered skirts, and everybody was very friendly. The children stared wide eyed and open mouthed at Lily’s long blond hair and pale skin. It was obvious that some of the women had never been close to a blue-eyed foreigner before.
The road was dusty and pot-holed and, inevitably, the bus broke down. We had been able to catch only fleeting glimpses of the lake, but when the bus broke down, it was at the top of a small hill with a gorgeous view of Lake Titicaca. The water was a lovely shade of blue with only a tiny scattering of little waves that sparkled in the sun, and the shore was fringed with the bright green of giant rushes. It was too wide for us to see the other shore, but the snow capped Andes were reflected in the calm waters.
“It’s so beautiful,” Lily whispered. “I didn’t realize it would be so big.” We stood there for a while, hand in hand, admiring the view, and I thought of the Incas and the Conquistadors and many others, including Simón Bolívar, who had passed that way and could have stopped at that very spot to admire the extraordinary lake and its beautiful setting.
The rest of the trip around Lake Titicaca went relatively smoothly, though very slowly, and by the time we reached Yungayo, the border between Peru and Bolivia was closed. It was dark and the temperature had plummeted. There were no street lights and the town was deserted, and I was beginning to get worried when a well-dressed, middle-aged man from the bus, who had been fascinated by Lily’s yellow hair and who knew a few words of English, cheerfully offered to find us somewhere to stay.
“Unfortunately, we have no hotel,” he said in Spanish, “but we could look at the pensiones.” The first pension, or rooming house, was a filthy hole full of drunks. We didn’t even look inside. But the second was an extraordinary place, straight out of the 17th century. The front door led directly into a large open room, which was crowded with long wooden tables and simple benches packed with men, all of them eating or drinking and some rolling dice or playing cards. Half a dozen oil lamps hung from the high ceiling, and through the thick tobacco smoke I could see a gallery running all around the main room and what seemed to be dozens of small bedrooms. The only women in the inn were the solidly built servants in heavy skirts who squeezed between the packed benches with bottles of beer and plates of food. There was a gentle roar of voices, and the old oil lamps gave the scene a yellow tint exactly like a painting of a medieval inn that I had seen in a museum somewhere.
There was no room at that inn, and it was clearly no place for a foreign woman, so we turned away. Undaunted, our guide took us to a little restaurant where he was obviously well known. After a spaghetti supper in the warm kitchen and a long discussion with the owner, he looked at us and said, “You’ll just have to stay at my place.”
His place, on the outskirts of the little town, was quite a large adobe farmhouse with a thick thatched roof. In the starlight, the entire house seemed to consist of one enormous room containing not just his kitchen and bedroom but also his storeroom and his workshop and all his possessions. There were a large double bed and a smaller single bed, some bicycles hanging on the wall, a table and chairs in the middle, and sacks or boxes in all the corners. Clothing hung from wooden pegs, and one or two shelves held bits of china and glass. All the available space was well used, and by the candlelight I could see an extraordinary wide range of objects, including tools that I had last seen in a museum at an old Spanish mission in California. Our host used one of the candles to show us the toilet. That is, he simply opened a back door and pointed out into the yard, where I could see a solitary tree. That was the toilet.
That night, Lily and I slept in the large bed on a hard straw mattress under half a dozen heavy cotton blankets, the candlelight reflecting off hand-carved wooden agricultural implements and tools, clay jars, and hand woven clothing hanging from wooden pegs. Except for the shiny plastic battery radio, it could have been the 17th century. The blankets were heavy, but they gave no warmth, and it was a very cold night on a very hard bed for me. Lily was so tired that she fell asleep immediately. Next morning, she claimed that she found the bed cozy and warm.
She was entranced by the idea that she had slept in an Indian farmhouse on the shores of Lake Titicaca, and before we had even sat down for a breakfast of coffee and freshly baked bread, she whispered, “Do you think he would show us around his farm? Daddy would be fascinated. It’s so different to the family farm back in South Dakota.”
Our host was only too pleased to show off his farm and his business, especially after Lily complimented him in Spanish on the freshly baked bread. It turned out that he had a bakery attached to the house. He took us immediately to see his ovens and to meet his baker. The ovens were large brick and adobe affairs fueled by kerosene, and there were huge wooden troughs for mixing the dough.
The baker was a tiny Aymara Indian with a very dark skin and a serious expression that did not hide his obvious pride in his ovens and his skill. Each morning, he baked enough bread to supply half the town. He became quite excited when Lily told him that her father was a baker, too. For the next half hour, they were buddies, and Lily’s Spanish improved immensely as they compared baking in Peru and in America and he showed off his mixture of ancient, hand-carved equipment and expensive gadgets imported from Argentina. It was obvious that the baker was having difficulty imagining that the father of this exotic, blonde American girl was only a humble baker, and he listened in awe as she proved that she knew what she was talking about. When she began to describe the stainless steel, automated, gas-fired ovens that her father operated, however, he shook his head and said something in Aymara that our host translated as, “If it is done with machines, where is the flavor?”
Suddenly, Lily gave squeal of delight. “Guinea pigs! Look at them warming themselves by the ovens. Aren’t they darling?” Since she had a pet guinea pig at home, she immediately reached down to pick one up.
Our host caught another one and held it up. “Would you like it for breakfast?” he asked.
Lily understood before I could translate it, and with a horrified gasp she took the little animal from his hands and placed it tenderly near the ovens. It took me a while to explain that in America the creatures were kept as pets and never eaten. The baker found it hard to believe, but our host laughed loudly and we continued our tour of his farm.
It was a wonderful experience. I had read so much about farming on the altiplano, but to actually see it all firsthand was a rare and exhilarating experience. We went first into a walled yard where the little Andean potatoes where being turned into chuno. For about a week, the potatoes lie spread...
