Things I Learned On Tuesday ( Part 1)

Sometimes to charge a camera overnight and make sure the battery indicator is flashing full is not enough. Certainly not in Bolivia on a trip beyond the Altiplano to lake Titicaca. Every second the eye blinks a photo is framed. The loss of another perfect image in the instantaneous moment a digital camera takes to readjust itself to take another shot becomes wildly irritating. Everything is to be photographed here, and yet nothing of the engulfing overwhelming beauty can really be conveyed in a collection of megapixels, regardless of the numeric scale.

The road between El Estrecha de Tequina and Copacabana on Lake Titicaca has been ashphalted from 1999. Before that it was a rough track passable by jeep and before that it was a route for only campesinos walking sure footedly on land that they knew, leading loaded donkeys from the straits of Tequina to Copacabana in the hope of selling their fish or the produce of their fields. The road cuts in to an expanse of mountain softened by vegetation that is precisely the colour of the back of a leaf of sage.

The announcements and proclamations made about Lake Titicaca are absolutely true. It is not like any other lake. It is a place of mystic power. The highest navigable lake in the world. It sparkles  crystalline. Unpolluted on the Bolivian side unlike the shores in Peru. It is a place so light filled, one can understand why the Aymara believe the Sun was born here, and the Incas believed it was the birth place of civilisation.

The most sobering thing I learned on my Tuesday outing was that in some locations tourism has no place. We were obliged to go to El Estrecha de Tequina to take a ferry across a corner of the lake to pick up the road to Copacabana, but this pueblo was not a place for strangers. Outsiders were  immediate voyeurs of a life that did not need them. The campesinos in Tequina honour the land, they live from it, living a life so far removed from the 21st century of the rest of us that a momentary stop in their town brought home another truth. This world is not now a small place reduced by telecommunications to a thimble, it is still a vast earth of differing cultures so complete in themselves that to step in without invitation is an intrusion, an insult, not a beneficent act.

The Aymara are subsistence farmers, they depend on the land. The deluge of recent rain has uprooted crops placing their valued self sufficiency in peril. I arrived on the day land grants were being provided as compensation. These grants were given by a government run by an indigenous president, raised on the land within a family of campesinos. Perhaps that is why the grants were given, and perhaps that is why they were accepted.