circleWhenever someone tells me to get up to greet the dawn, I always pause… but saying yes to bad ideas is part of the fun of traveling. My guide, Pablo, warns me: dawn is amazing, so don’t miss it. So when the first pink rays of light filter through my east-facing curtains, I jump up.
From the terrace there is a steep descent to the lake, which has the patina of hammered copper. A flock of seagulls flutter over it. Gulls flying over the 4,000-metre mountains! In the distance, the snow-capped peaks of Bolivia’s Monte Iyampu rise from the rose-coloured shores, piercing a deep blue sky where the last stars are fading. Pablo appears, then Francisco, and we are awed and silent. Francisco can’t hold himself back any longer. “Come on, the fishing nets are waiting.”
Lake Titicaca is one of the most beautiful sights in the world. It’s hard to believe that this vast inland sea exists in the sky. If it were in Europe, its surface would be higher than all the highest peaks in Switzerland and Austria, and its area would be more than twice the size of the lakes in those countries combined. As I follow Francisco out to the boat, Pablo recites one amazing fact after another about his hometown. He was born on the Isle of the Moon, a large island next to the lake. “The first Inca king emerged from those waters. It’s home to seahorses. There are lost cities. Look!” When we reach the shore, he bends down and picks up a stone. I discern a constellation of tiny fossil shells.
I’m on the second stage of my journey, from the Andean highlands to the mouth of the Amazon. I took a bus from Cusco, Peru, to the bustling city of Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, then crossed the border into Bolivia and caught a boat taxi to the lake’s twin islands, Sun and Moon. And now I’m there. Titicaca has never been a serious contender for the source of the Amazon (it lies in the mountainous north), but it is a centre of indigenous culture. The Bolivian side of the lake is much quieter, used mainly by local holidaymakers and backpackers.
Francisco releases the boat and we sail into the sun. Titicaca is one of those places you only hear about when something is wrong. Even before I saw it, I knew there was low water levels, over-pumping, overfishing, rampant pollution, invasive species, and extinct native fish. In my mind, I feel this drip of despair sinking into a drainage pond next to the highway slip road, and this just can’t be. I can’t stop grinning. It’s so amazing to be out on this magnificent body of water at dawn.
Francisco stopped us at the south end of the island and pulled up the net. The small fish that came up were Ypsicommon endemic species. CaranciI“That’s rare these days,” Francisco says. I make sure to put it back.
I’ve come to see how tourism has affected these two rocky islands on the Bolivian side of Titicaca. Francisco talks to me about his childhood. “There was no tourism then. In fact, there was a prison for political prisoners on the island. My father was a revolutionary and helped some of them escape in 1972, one of them became vice president.” He laughs as he waves his net, sending live silver rain down on and over the boat. “After the prison was closed, experts identified the ruins next to my house as an Inca shrine to the Virgin Mary, and people started coming,” he says.
At the time, he says, all the men on the island, about 27 in number, were full-time fishermen. “Now there are only seven fishermen left, the rest are in tourism.” He started a homestay, while others found work as guides and boat taxi drivers. We finished hauling in the nets. We’d had a good haul. Francisco grinned. “We caught a lot of fish, too.”
Back at the house, Francisco’s wife, Maria, has prepared a sort of brunch and dinner for us the night before, everything brought from Titicaca and its coasts. “Life is better now,” she says. “Tourism jobs keep young people from leaving.” As she speaks, she is knitting colorful yarn into intricately patterned belts and bands that she sells to tourists. I ask about the patterns. “I got them from my grandmother, who got them from her grandmother, and so on. It’s like a history book.”
Francisco laughs: “It’s a book that no one can read.”
He wants to add two more rooms to the three he’s already built. When I ask him if he’d like to add Wi-Fi, he shakes his head: “On this island, we’re already connected to the sun, moon and stars. What more do you want?”
I wander among the temple ruins and walk down the hill to the island’s only village, where llamas and sheep graze on the shore next to flocks of waterfowl – Andean coots and teals, but no endemic flightless Titicaca grebes. The island only gets regular boat services from the mainland on weekends, so it’s very calm on a weekday. I swim among the birds and am surprised the water is not as cold as I’d expected.
In the afternoon, Pablo and I travel to Isla de la Sun, his hometown, a larger, more populous place with a daily ferry. “Most tourists only stay for an hour,” he says, “so it’s quiet at night.” Born into a family of fishermen, he has seen firsthand how tourism can change lives. “I grew up in poverty; we only ate fish and potatoes.”We walk to the Temple of the Sun. Built around 150 BC, it was stripped of its gold and idols by Spanish conquerors in 1538.
I’m staying in a simple hostel up the hill that Maria and her daughter run. “There are no big hotel chains here,” Maria tells me. “The local situation wouldn’t allow it. Everything is small and local. We built the place ourselves and transported everything here on two donkeys. There are no cars on the island.”
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Outside my room, I watch a giant hummingbird high in the flowering trees – a species common here. An old man passes by with tools, heading towards terraced fields being prepared for the expected rains. It is so dry. The Amazon’s much-publicized drought is the result of a lack of rain in the Andes, an annual dry period exacerbated by El Niño and climate breakdown.
The attitude of the people here is calm, and all they want to talk about is COVID. The experience feels raw and recent. Many have lost their income, and some hostels on the island are still closed. Later on in the journey, we heard stories of people who needed cash taking temp jobs in the drug trade, heading to coca-growing areas to work as pickers, cooks and laborers. Global cocaine production (Bolivia, Peru and Colombia) has recently skyrocketed, now covering an area larger than France in total, causing massive deforestation and pollution (coca plantations are sprayed with large amounts of pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers). Because soil fertility is low in places of the rainforest, illegal farms are periodically relocated, destroying more pristine forest.
After a night on the Island of the Sun, we take a water taxi back to the little town of Copacabana. There are some cool new buildings, rumoured to have been built with the proceeds of cocadilly scams, but the atmosphere is a far cry from the Netflix-esque drug world. This is a peaceful, easy-going town, and the main event of the day is a special mass in the cathedral for the patron saint, St. Francis, whose effigy is paraded around the square by well-dressed women. Chola Many costumes, including bowler hats, vicuna wool shawls, and layered petticoats, Chola It has become a symbol of indigenous tradition and pride.
The city’s dogs sleep while listening to a sermon being amplified in front of the famous statue of the Virgin Mary, brought here in 1583 by Tito Yupanqui, a descendant of the last Inca emperor, Atahualpa.
The next day I spent a few hours walking along the lake shore searching for the elusive endemic little grebe. I didn’t find any, but I did come across a formidable old bird called Anna. Cholatook us around the village of Sawinha, a fishing village that wants to encourage tourism but is still in the early stages.
There is a village hall, where comfortable rooms can be rented at surprisingly low rates, but it appears to be unused. Anna and her friends invite me to a lunch of five kinds of boiled potatoes; but I clearly don’t have the appetite or the cravings one would expect for such a feast. I can see they are perplexed. Local tourists prefer the noisy big restaurants built on reed rafts and the abundance of boiled potatoes, but foreigners seem less satisfied. Afterwards, some villagers bundling reeds onto donkeys stopped and watched with bewilderment as I photographed the birds. Eventually I said my goodbyes and walked off in search of a flock of Chilean flamingos that had flown in.
That evening, I climbed a lakeside mountain overlooking Copacabana. At the top is a shrine where worshippers offer symbolic models of what they want the gods to grant them. The most common prayer seems to be for a pickup truck, but more ambitious supplicants ask for luxury buses or concrete mixers. After making their wishes known, everyone walks out to watch the sun set on the lake. Two girls share moments on Instagram, some backpackers talk about sunsets in other countries, and one man ignores his young daughter’s playful requests. Without any divine or human intervention, the sun has set over Peru, transforming Titicaca into a golden furnace. The girls put down their phones, the backpackers fall silent, and the man picks up his daughter and holds her in his arms.
This trip Smack TravelLake Titicaca (Island of the Sun and Moon), Uyuni Salt Flats, Amazon Rainforest ( Rurrenabaque) From GBP 1,485 per person Includes accommodation, domestic flights, guided activities, transportation and some meals.
The third part of Kevin’s Amazon adventure will be released online on July 1st
