It was the small city of Puno, and there is not really much there, but its claim to fame is that the
Uro people live in the shallow bay of lake Titicaca that the city sits on.
The Uros live on floating islands made of reeds... They craft things out of the reeds and this includes their islands, their boats, and their houses.
So I took a little tour by boat out to the reed islands to go see.
The basic details are that the lake is between about 3m and 12m deep in the bay where they live.
The reeds that they use to make their houses and "famous" boats grow to about 5m in height (and they seem to be the standard reeds that Im used to seeing in most wetlands).
There are only about 2500 of the Uros in total but their "culture" seems to be surviving OK
The reed islands require constant maintenance and the people are constantly harvesting reeds to put down new layers (laid in alternate directions to get good "cross-bonding"). The whole mass is about 4m thick, but the water is only 30cm below the surface of the reed islands.
The Houses are made from several layers of reed mats and are up on a platform another 30cm or so above the "island" level.
Cooking is done on a small baked clay "oven " that is sitting on a large flat stone... Fire is a real danger for them so its not used much!
There were a few solar panels around the place, so they do have some use for electricity but its very minimal.
The boats made from reeds are very interesting, and are the "iconic" image that most people recognise about the Uro culture. They are basically made of two fat and two thin "sausages" of reeds that are tapered to an up-curved point at both ends. The sausages are bound very tightly together by a spiral winding of thread (synthetic these days but originally also from reed fibres). The two large sausages are placed side by side and bound together. These form the main hull of the boat. The two thinner sausages are bound onto the other fat ones along the top outside edges to form low"sides" for the boat to keep stuff in. The boats can be very large...I saw a couple that I would guess were 10m in length!
And thats it!... The construction is very simple, very light, and very strong. I think the trick is in getting the bundles of reeds to be the exact right shape and bound very tightly.
It seems that these days, the Uros make much of their living through the tourist industry.
It also seemed to me that while the image of all the boats and houses was very "reedy", most things had a more modern "sub-structure"...
The floors of all the houses that I saw were made of planks of wood.
The roofs of all the houses I saw were actually made of corrugated iron with a layer of reeds over the top.
All of the reed boats had a layer of blue polythene plastic wrapping up the sausages, hidden under about 2-3cm of reeds.
I dont blame the Uros for adopting modern technologies to make their lives easier, but it did seem to me to be "all a bit of a show" to get the tourist dollars... To which I contributed of course...
It is what it is, and we all make our way through life as best we can :)))
