Isla del Cold

The journey from beautiful Arequipa to beautiful Isla del Sol was chilly and janky, but well worth the effort. We have become comfortable with the Latin American way, so when a random dude hops on the bus at a random location and assesses a random thirty cent tax, we just pay it and wait for him to hop off and run off to buy those cigarettes he's been dying for.

We froze our asses off waiting for a connecting bus at the Puno station. Anne and Suzy didn't sleep on the bus because a little girl was making a racket expelling her car sickness in and around the rolling bathroom. An undocumented man sold us bus tickets to Copacabana, or rather, the promise of bus tickets, since he never gave us any proof of purchase, but simply wrote our names down on a clipboard tucket behind an unmarked counter. We figured that there was a good chance that he had just ripped us off, but the loss of feeling in our extremities turned out to be a more pressing issue. After several hours of sitting around a little cafe opened up and we drank the best, hottest, worst coffee in the world. Delicious!

Copacabana, resting casually at the edge of Lake Titicaca, is a tourist destination for Bolivianos. Paddle boats line the shore and a daily circus of makeshift restaurants specializing in Titicacan gold, trout, open along a 100 meter stretch of what could only generously be called a beach. Apparently trout or trucha, in Spanish, is a big draw for the touristos, so every restaurant has a big sign out front that excitedly declares it on the menu. Trucha a la plancha! Trucha con limon! Trucha frita! We ate our fill of trucha. Mucha trucha. Our trucha immersion soon turned the rather cute moniker into a four letter word.

We stayed at a funky hotel with styrofoam statues coated in cement lining the balconies. The owner, Manuel, eagerly sold us a room and then began getting shifty on the prices. Everything is so cheap here we just didn't care, and his craftiness only made us laugh. The streets of the city are lined with Alpaca hats, gloves, panchitos, placemats and pretty much anything else you can think of that can be woven, knit, embroidered or otherwise sewn together. Does anybody want a cute hand knit beanie that says ALPACA along the edge?

The market in Copacabana is about 5 blocks long, filling the narrow alley and bustling with trade. Everything from meat to coca leaves to OMO laundry soap is on sale. We cruised it. A woman was selling ice cream. She had two buckets, one filled with ice water, and inside that, another filled with cream. She used a spoon to spin the inside bucket, forcing the cream against the edge and freezing it. A minute of deft spinning makes for a couple of scoops, which she scrapes off using her same spoon. Two buckets, ice and a spoon. She's the ice cream lady.

Isla del Sol, a two hour boat ride from Copacabana, is a strange little piece of history. Settled by the Incas and currently occupied by their descendents, the Aymara, its 4000 meter altitude and amazing panoramic Andean views figuratively and literally took our breath away. The entire island is terraced for crops, but hardly any of it is farmed any more. Llamas, sheep and pigs roam freely in and out of their adobe enclosures and herds of animals are constantly on the move to and from various grazing areas on both sides of the island. Ancient villages with tiny, ancient paths winding in and around melting adobe abodes, are paved with volcanic rock worn smooth from hundreds of years of trodding. There are no cars on the island and if there were they would need to be fairly sturdy off roaders, because there aren't any roads wide enough to support a vehicle.

At night, the island is pitch black and an utterly stupefying display of astronomical glory paints the sky. The milky way appears as a bright white cloudy stripe from horizon to horizon. Standing at the top of Yumani village, looking up, I felt like an astronaut, floating amongst a sea of stars. There is a legend that the stars are simply pin pricks in the roof of the sky which the light of the gods shines through. It's an explanation that seems hard to deny on Isla del Sol.

We sleep under four Alpaca blankets with our hats on and our hands tucked warmly between our legs. As soon as the sun descends below the mountains, the temperature drops ten degrees celsius. Along with a lack of oxygen, cold is a way of life here. Everyone wears the Alpaca gear we saw for sale in Copacabana. The women, especially the older ones, wear ten layers of clothes - petticoats, leg warmers over socks, sweaters upon sweaters and gloves upon gloves. And they top it off with a proper British bowler, still conforming to a decree by the Spanish colonial goveners issued over a hundred years ago.

The pace of the island was such a nice departure from the hustle of the cities we had been visiting that we found it hard to depart. But our friend and porter, Seberino, arranged a ride in a local boat for us and we and forty Islans crammed on board to make the sunny trip back to Copacabana. At the harbor we collided with another boat, and the whistling exchange between the captains didn't seem to indicate any fault or ill feeling concerning the incident. Just another ordinary mid-lake collision, some whistling, and Suzy's fingernails buried in my thigh.