Writings By Date| Isla Taquile: Slow Death by Tourism | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
We arrived at Taquile just before noon. Taquile is quite a primitive island. It's big enough to hold 2000 people in 800 families, but small enough to have no running water, little electricity (all of it solar), and no roads — just stone trails, almost all of those dating back to pre-Incan times. There are no businesses to speak of, but there are several restaurants (mostly kitchens in people's homes) and a few small shops selling water or snacks, usually not at grossly inflated prices. Every square inch of the island is terraced. There are no stray dogs — a first for this continent — but plenty of stray sheep. There are no cars, and no telephones that I could tell, although there were many radios, and — appearing very out of place — a few giant satellite dishes, inevitably hooked up to tiny 13-inch TVs, some even in black and white.
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| Entering Taquile |
Upon arriving at the island, we had to hike to a small plaza area for lunch, which lay at the top of a hill, about 500 feet above us. The path was straight up a steep, stone stairway that wove through the terraces along the side of the island. At this altitude (3850 meters, which is over 12,500 feet), a 500-foot climb turned out to be no small task!! We were exhausted when we reached the top about 30 minutes later, but we had ample time to collect our breath as we were shuffled into a restaurant by our guide, Manuel. There, he explained to us the native dress customs: the men wore their hat, belt, and purse to signify their marital and dating status, and the women wore their blanket/shawl in kind. What is most intriguing, however, is that the men are the big knitters here — not the women.
We then sat down to lunch; I liked the tortilla taquile, which was basically an omelette with cheese, onion, and tomato. Manuel directed all those on the day trip where the main plaza was, and gave them half an hour before they needed to head back down to the boat. (With six hours on a boat, and only two hours on this island, I now see why our travel agent strongly discouraged us from doing this as a day trip.) Then Manuel took us aside, and walked with us to our accommodations.
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| Tight Fit |
Actually, it might be generous calling them accommodations, in the usual sense. In order to reach them, we had to walk through a narrow alleyway between two concrete buildings, and I mean narrow: we barely fit our fat asses alone in this foot-wide space. Good thing we only had day packs with us. Once we wrestled our way through there, we rounded the corner and emerged in a small courtyard in front of a small two-story building containing nothing but a couple of guest rooms. The room we chose, since we had the "whole place" to ourselves, was an upstairs room with a fabulous view of the lake to the east, but with a ceiling about six inches higher than our heads. Actually, that's not quite right: the ceiling was about a foot over our heads; it was the rain tarp was only six inches over us. But so long as we remembered to duck when we walked in — which was actually hard to remember, because you already had to duck just to walk along the "balcony", but had to duck more for the front door — we figured it would be just fine.
Manuel also introduced us here to Francisco, our host, who told us this was actually his brother's place. We're not sure why we were here, and not with Francisco — or, for that matter, why we weren't with anyone, since his brother clearly didn't live here at the moment, unless he slept like a bum in the alleyway. We decided that Manuel must have made some suggestion to Francisco about it being better for us to stay closer to "town", but neither of us picked up on that in their conversation. Either that, or Francisco knew how bad we'd smell by morning, and didn't want us scaring away his sheep.
