Friday 15th April 1988
I had a really good nights sleep and felt a lot better for it. Firstly, I went for a walk around the town. There were a lot of sturdy Indian women in bowler hats, many of them squatting amongst wares for sale. Three-wheel bicycle taxis with two wheels at the front, ferried people about, squatting in lordly fashion on their baggage in the glorified butcher’s bike wicker baskets.
I walked along the waterlogged avenue to the docks where small boats were loading up with locals clutching their sacks of belongings. The huge Lake Titicaca spread off into the distance. Lake Titicaca is one of the largest and highest lakes in South America situated in the high Andes at an altitude of 4000 metres.
According to my guidebook by visiting Puno and the many manmade and natural islands on Titicaca, a traveller or a historian can get a deeper insight into centuries-old Aymara and Quechua civilizations that have thrilled on the banks of Titicaca, which is a special place for both Peruvians and Bolivians religiously.
There were also a couple of huge merchant ships moored off the jetty. I walked east along the Avenida el Sol to the covered food market. The roads were dusty, and I saw nothing remarkable. I returned via the two town plazas, which have a couple of nice colonial buildings, but on the whole Puno is a bit of a two bob (two bit) town with nothing to write home about.
I changed some money in a tour office at 105 I/- per $1 US dollar and went on a mini shopping spree. Around the stalls by the Hotel Europa, I bought a razor blade, bananas, bread and toilet roll and then returned to my room for a mammoth catching-up-with-my-diary session. In between bouts of writing, I munched sardine sandwiches and drank maracuya juice.
At 16:30 hrs. with a mild case of writers’ cramp, I went out to find the Tourist Office. I bumped into Karin Brann, one of the Swedes that I met on the train, and she accompanied me. I discovered that the cheapest way to get to Taquile Island was to turn up at the dock between 07:00 hrs. and 08:00 hrs. in the morning to get a boat.
Breaching the green waters of Lake Titicaca is the little mound island of Taquile where the local villagers have created a steady industry of knit handicrafts, which are knit by the men of the community.
The fine textiles that come out of Taquile are renowned the world over and are even protected as a UNESCO world heritage subject. However, unlike the often tragically traditional view of knitting and textile work as the demesne of women, it is the men of Taquile Island do much of the delicate thread work.
The craftwork is divided between weaving and knitting; women do the weaving, while the knitting is man’s work. The tradition begins when they are young as boys on the island begin learning their trade at the tender age of 8. Chief among these crafts are the iconic chuyo hats that many of the locals wear. Women can also be found making yarn and other tasks surrounding the creation of the items.
Karin’s friend was flying back to Sweden from La Paz and she expressed an interest in travelling with me – great! We browsed around the artisan stalls looking at the alpaca jumpers and colourful hats. I went back to my room for another writing session until 19:00 hrs. when I joined Karin and Joe for a visit to the cinema.
We saw “Innerspace”, an interesting idea: In San Francisco, down-on-his-luck U.S. Navy aviator Lt. Tuck Pendleton resigns his commission and volunteers for a secret miniaturization experiment. He is placed in a submersible pod and both are shrunk to microscopic size. They are transferred into a syringe to be injected into a rabbit, but the lab is attacked by a rival organization, led by scientist Dr. Margaret Canker, that plans to seize the experiment and steal the miniaturization technology and it is accidentally injected into a man. It was reasonable film fun.
After the film we had a meal in the Internacional, joining a Kiwi and a German called Reinhard. We were all tired and walked back to the hotel in the cold night air at 22:00 hrs. for an early night. Before turning in I packed up my excess luggage and put it in the hotel store.
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