Le Regard Libre N° 22 - Marina De Toro
«My last trip, in the form of a story and photographs. Episode 2/2»
After three days« trekking in the Colca Canyon, we headed for Puno, a city situated at an altitude of 3800 metres on the shores of the famous Lake Titicaca. We made the journey by night bus, and when we arrived in Puno early in the morning, the cold and lack of air took us by surprise. We spent the whole day on this immense lake, straddling Peru (60%) and Bolivia (40%). Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in the world, and is three times as long as Lake Geneva. On this immense expanse of water, we visited two islands: a small group of artificial islets called the »Uros" islands, and the natural island of Taquile. It takes around two hours by boat to get from one island to the next, which is a testament to the lake's surface area, given that we only crossed a small part of it.
The inhabitants of one of the Uros islands welcomed us with song and dance, dressed in the region's traditional garb. They live on artificial islets made from totora, a reed-like plant that grows in the lake and is used not only for the construction of all infrastructures, but also considered a fundamental economic element of the islands. Before the arrival of mass tourism, «Uros» was the name of the people who originally lived on these floating islands, but they disappeared in the middle of the 20th century.th century to make way for the Aymaras (people of Lake Titicaca).
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