Lake Titicaca, Peru, February 2001


On the way to Taquile Island we stopped at the floating islands. These are built of reeds and have to be constantly replenished with new reeds as the old ones on the bottom rot away. At one time, they were populated by the Uro people, but intermarriage with the Aymara, has caused the Uro language to be lost.

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The following pictures are not in any real order -- they're basically pictures that didn't neatly fit anywhere else. The first two are of Lake Titicaca from the Bolivian side.

After leaving Lake Titicaca, we drove west, towards Cuzco. Along the way, we stopped by a farm house by the side of the road. The crop in the terrace is various kinds of potatoes. My recollection is that there are several thousand species of potato in South America, of which something on the order of three hundred are cultivated.

Finally, we came across a herd of llama and alpaca. I have difficulty telling them apart, but I think the first photograph is an alpaca, and the second is a llama (pronounced in the Spanish fashion, yama). In addition to being shorn for wool, both are also used for meat. Llama is fairly tough and gamey. How does alpaca taste? Just like llama...