March 1, Off to the islands on Lago Titicaca

At 8 a.m. after our usual bread and tea breakfast at the hostel, we were picked up by a van and off on our unique adventure of visiting and a homestay on these islands (there are about 85 or so, not exact because some of them are floating and if they don´t get along, the 10 families or so who live on one cut the island apart and form a new one!!) Our group first: There was a lovely 20 something couple from Buenos Aires who didn´t speak much English but were very nice. He works for the subway system there, she´s a buyer for clothing, and was dressed lovely! Compared to most of the rest of us scruffy ones! Barbara is from Germany, a manager fora  volunteer agency, has a daughter living in Arequipa and she speaks fluent Spanish but not much English. Emmanuelle is from Toronto, is an osteopath, has her own practice out of her home and is down here for two years in a row volunteering in Arequipa for a month doing medical work with Peruvians. Her boyfriend works with street people in Toronto, some kind of social agency I guess, and is working now in Ecuador and they´ll connect later. Laura is a social worker from Scotland and she was doing a mission in Cusco with teenager girls who have been abused, etc.,  here for a few weeks and is headed home today. She was traveling from Cusco with Madeline, an 18 yearold just out of high school who is doing a gap year before starting school maybe in Ottowa. She was working in the rain forest in deforestation (clearing paths, I think) for a few weeks. She got bit by a bullet ant on her hand - feels like you were shot with a bullet and her whole hand swelled up. they gave her some leaves to chew and then put on it (she said it was kind of hallucinogenic) and it got better. Very painful!  She was delightful and kept asking me questions and encouraging my stories!!! Poor girl got an earful!! :) She´s from outside Toronto and I told her if I go to see the first retreat in Ottowa, I´d call her!! Then there was Eli, a doctoral candidate in paleontology, studying in Lima, from Paris, with his visiting girlfriend, Sandrene, who is a chemist for L´Óreal. He said (she spoke almost no English and seemed very shy, although gorgeous reddish hair and creamy skin - must be all those LÓreal products!) that she had yearly contracts so had a nice apartment in Paris (VERY expensive he said for something even tiny!) so I´m assuming he lives with her, said they´d been together a year.  He asked if we´d seen sloths in the jungle - we had, just one hanging by one arm from a tree - and said he was doing his doctoral studies on an extinct sloth, land based, gorilla size! I asked what he might do for a job when he was finished and he laughed! Hadn´t a clue! Thought he might do a post-doc stint in Lima! Very nice and helpful!!

Our boat has a car engine so went VERY slowly but I didn´t mind. It was relaxing! We stopped at Uro floating island - very small, only 10 families, 32 people (2 babies). The reeds need constant resurfacing yearly and it was 10 years old, would last another 10 maybe and they would move to a newly constructed island. Tourism is their next occupation and they were ready for us with their wares all laid out. The men weave the reeds into little boats, hanging ornaments, the ladies do the knitting and weaving. A little girl grabbed us from the boat to show us her family´s hut with two beds, one for parents one for 2 kids. One hut was for cooking. Then, of course, she wanted us to buy. We resisted! There is a chemical toilet somewhere recently required by the government. There is a floating island school or boat for kids. We then paid 10 soles for a ride in the tatori raft boat, with two little girls singing songs in our boat as we met up with the big boat. On to the second island Amantani, that was a stationary one with terraces for farming. It´s a real communal society with a president who doesn´t get paid a salary, works for a year, and someone else does his farming. The tourist visitors are rotated among 500+ families so maybe our host family hadn´t had visitors in over a year. The ladies were waiting at the dock for us and we were matched up! We went with Emmy 45 and her daughter Jenny 6. It turns out Clever the guide was also staying at their farm. Then we started climbing up and up!! We´d left everything but a small backpack at the hostel in Puna but still with the altitude I was huffing and puffing and resting a lot! We finally arrived and shown our lovely room with 4 beds, heavy alpaca blankets - so heavy you could hardly turn over under them! Made me wonder how in the world they EVER have sex under this! First thing Emmy did was bring out her huge bundle of all her knitting. She was knitting all the time we saw her, even walking around, except when we saw her cook. I hate feeling the pressure to buy stuff!! And carry stuff!  It was time for lunch so we went outside their courtyard (where the bathroom was -it was huge, very modern, but no shower water! But the toilet flushed! Fortunately I had my headlamp for our during the night visits. There was a plastic chamber pot in the room but we both opted for going outside. When I went out at 2 am the moon was shining, and the stars were incredible in a place where there is no electricity! Actually they had a solar panel on the roof and had a small fluorescent in the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. When I went out again at 5 am the sky in the east was rosy and the birds were making an incredible racket. One couple said they had a rooster crowing at 4 am but we didn´t hear it!) The kitchen was a separate building tinier than the bathroom, with a woodburning stove reminiscent of colonial times. Emmy prepared delicious soup, then a plate of rice, potatoes. Only vegetarian pretty much on this island. There are like 40 different kinds of potatoes. We were to bring a gift for our family so we had bought a bag of rice and lentils from the grocery store, neither of which they grow there. We had the usual coca tea (really helps with the altitude). We met Emilio, 50, the father in the family, and Madelay, the 14 year old daughter. I asked Clever later privately why the families were so small, since they were all Catholic. He said recently the last 2 years of high school students were taught about all that. I was surprised! On the next island he said couples meet and marry around 20 but are encouraged to live together for 2 years before the wedding! These clans are so isolated in the past that they each developed variations in the cultures. Clever took us to the Plaza de Armes where the church was (a priest only comes once a year from Puno - for weddings, baptisms, etc.) so it was closed. He was leading them on a 3 hour hike to the top of the mountain but I passed. I walked around the village, over to the west side to find a spot to view the sunset and watch the couples coming home from the fields carrying bundles of firewood (eucalyptus leaves), maybe potatoes, and their tools. Very peaceful and bucolic! No vehicles anywhere in sight, although Clever said the boat we were riding on was made on this island. By dark many locals were gathering in the Plaza to visit, a lady was grilling potatoes I guess, and people came by. Finally the hiking group showed up exhausted and I was glad I had passed. Back to Emmy´s for dinner around 7:30 of again a delicious vegetable soup, more rice, potatoes, etc. with lots of cooked vegetables. And then a good night´s sleep. More later! Clever was our Peruvian guide and he took us to the boat at the port. He said we had to sit inside until we were well away from the coast guard who didn´t want us to sit on top. So he gave us information about these amazing reeds-tatora - that are used for everything from eating the inside (very pleasant tasting, sort of like celery - kids were munching on them) to building their floating islands, to making boats that we took a ride in. Apparently they date back hundreds of years getting away from warring natives like the Incas, so they floated out on this highest navigable lake in the world, second in size only to Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Their first occupation is fishing, then hunting (ducks, etc), then egg gathering - they only take one egg from a nest of maybe 8+, then