Afloat on Travel and Time
THE SHORES OF LAKE TITICACA — October 1987 — Tourists rarely walk on water but now we had our chance. At 12,500 feet, surrounded by a fluffy sky and mountains climbing still higher, we stepped onto an island floating on the bluest of blue lakes.
The “ground” beneath us felt spongy, squishy. But we walked on, past houses made of the same reeds that kept us afloat. We met kind people in colorful clothes. We made paper airplanes for their children, who laughed as they tossed them to the breeze. And we signed one family’s guestbook. This island? This reed island floating on a lake high in the Andes? It had guests from Japan, China, India, Egypt, Paris, London. . .
The world comes to the Uros Islands because they are not — technically — islands. They are reed mats, intricately interwoven and adrift on Peru’s side of the world’s highest navigable lake. The Uros Islands are also, the BBC wrote “one of the most innovative feats of human engineering.”
Since 1500 BCE, the Uro people, calling themselves “sons of the Sun,” all but owned Lake Titicaca. Fishing, hunting, raising cattle on its shores, they lived free, protected from rivals by the alltitude and the cold. But in the early 1500s, the Inca Empire approached. Rather than fight, the Uros fled — onto the lake.
Their brilliant engineering began by harvesting the bull rushes that grow both along the shore and several feet underwater. Cutting these reeds, which reach ten feet in length, the people dried them in the sun, then bound them together. Bound, tied, interwoven, the reeds formed building blocks called khili. Tie the blocks together, overlay with other reeds, and you have an island of sorts.
For hundreds of years, the Uros Islands floated in the middle of giant Lake Titicaca. The people lived off trout, catfish, the Kingfishers that flew overhead, and eggs from the Ibis. They also used the reeds, known locally as tortora, for everything from medicine to tea to building their own homes. Tortora also made strong and pliable boats that rowed from island to island.
Then in 1986, a huge storm hit the lake, blowing several islands all the way into neighboring Bolivia. Another storm, called modernity, had already blown young people off the islands and into the cities. Elders decided it was time to move the islands to safer ground, and to pursue a side industry — tourism.
Some despaired at what they would lose but many felt they had no choice. So the floating islands were floated just offshore and anchored by poles made of eucalyptus branches. By the mid-1980s, as nearby Maccu Picchu became a major tourist destination, the world began to drop by. And while the Uros Islands don’t draw the million-plus who visit the Inca’s “lost city,” some 200,000 people a year now step onto their squishy “ground.”
Tourism brought its usual double-edged sword. Children raised on these islands can now attend high school in nearby Puno and college elsewhere. Income from the sales of handicrafts has bankrolled solar panels that brought the first electricity to the islands. But as Slate magazine noted, “A culture that survives entirely off the voyeurism of the outside world and maintains its existence as a kind of tribal zoo feels inherently empty. But what's the alternative. . . The Uros could erect a barricade and close off access to their part of the lake. Or they could literally up sticks and rebuild their islands farther away from Puno, where the tourist boats would find them harder to reach. It would mean returning to poverty, hunger, and a subsistence lifestyle.”
Where once the islands held only houses, now they have a small elementary school, a medical clinic, and an FM radio station. Some islands hold only a few houses but others are home to 30-50 people. A few have Air BnB’s, with prices ranging from $100-300 a night. But the islands’ 1,200 permanent residents still live in reed huts, paddle reed boats, and in another feat of “human engineering,” struggle to preserve their traditions.
The children who tossed our paper airplanes in the breeze so long ago are now older than we were then. Some may live in Puno, others in Lima. But the Uros people still live here, where they have lived for millenia — on their lake, floating on water, on time, adrift between the modern and the ancient. They are the words of Pablo Neruda become flesh.
Rise up to be born with me, brother.
Give me your hand from the deep
Zone seeded by your sorrow. . .
Give me silence, water, hope.
