Where the Sun Was Born - Top of the World

5-20-11 1:15pm
Where I left off, I hiked up Cerro Cavalria to see the sunset. It was quite the difficult uphill hike, but it was worth it. Amazing view from the top, though a completely different view from the other peak earlier in the day. The sun was in the distance over the lake, surrounded by all the mountains and hills and some low fluffy clouds. It was really cool to watch the sun disappear into the horizon and the shadow descend slowly over the lake, engulfing more and more of the water until it covered the area I was standing. I stayed for a few minutes more, but couldn’t watch too much of the color spreading through the sky because I had to hike back down – even with my headlamp, doing that in the dark wouldn’t be fun.
In the morning, I left my bag at the hostel and after a quick breakfast, went down to the water to catch the boat to the island. I sat on the benches up on the top of the boat and had to bundle up, it was freezing cold, especially with the wind over the water, but the views were really nice. The ride took longer than it should have because our motor kept turning off and we stopped and spun in circles for a bit before we started off again. There was another boat that left at the same time we did and must have gotten there half an hour before, we could see it speeding ahead in the distance. On the boat, I met an English guy who was also staying the night on the island, not just doing a quick day trip like most people were, so we hiked the island together. Started out intending to head to ruins at the north of the island, but ended up losing the trail at some point and finding out from some locals that we weren’t heading towards the ruins – per a woman working in the fields, all there was in that direction were potato fields! It turned out that we had accidentally turned onto the eastern leg of the island. It was a pretty long route that we took, but it was nice to see the side of the island that tourists never go to, just lots of grazing donkeys (including one really cute long-haired one) and women surrounded by piles of different colored potatoes; there are countless varieties of potatoes here.
Back in the area where the boat had dropped us, we figured out which way was actually north and headed up to the Chicana ruins. It was a really, really intense hike, both because it was at 3900 meters and the trail was kept winding up and down, up and down. We kept thinking we were there, but nope, around more and more bends. Eventually made our way up to the ruins and they were more than worth the painful hike. Many people had guides, but we just used my guidebook and got by pretty well. The first thing we saw were these big oval “footprints” in the stone path that are said to be the first footprints of the sun on earth after it was born. Then came a ceremonial table that was used for human and animal sacrifice, though there is debate whether the Incans actually sacrificed humans. It took a little while to get oriented because the guidebook used directional terms to describe where everything was, but I found the famous rock, Titi K’harka. It is said to be the birthplace of the sun, and people come here in swarms every June 21, winter solstice, to visit the site. The book described the rock as looking like a crouching puma and I’m usually awful at seeing that sort of thing, but after figuring out the general area, I found a tail and from there found a face and was able to see the figure of the puma really well. It is from this rock that the lake was named Titicaca, and it is one of the most sacred places for Bolivians. Up at that point, we were at one of the highest points in the area, over 4000 meters, and you could see everything on all sides, surrounded by a quiet beautiful paradise. After the rock came the labyrinth, which was a really huge maze of ruins. It reminded me of portions of Machu Picchu minus the huge crowds of people pushing from behind. There were endless doors, big and small, to walk through, and views through the stone window of the lake, mountains, and other islands. At one point, I got lost in the labyrinth, following door after door and eventually ending up in a dead end and having to trace my way back out.
We climbed back down to Ch’allapampa, the place where the boat had left us, and took a break sitting on the beach there. My book had described another beach further along as being straight out of a Greek island, but it was this beach that fit that description - clear calm water with shades of blue and green and soft white sand like I’ve never seen. After a rest at the beach, we started on the long journey to the south of the island. There were two routes, one up on the ridge that tourists take more often, and one along the eastern coast that winds through pueblitos (little towns). We asked a local along the way and he recommended the coast route, so we went that one. It was 11km about took us about 4 hours including plenty of little breaks when we were dying from the hills and altitude. The hike was really, really painful and by the end, I ached all over and still do the day after, but it was worth doing. Each side of the island had very different views as it curved around and around. There was tons of going uphill, some of it on slippery rocks, small stones, lots of unstable gravel, and there were some nicer bits with smooth big stones of red or white covered with a light coating of sand. I wanted to look around me the whole time, but sometimes it was a matter of just making it up the hill and looking only at the ground in front of me. We’d get to the top of the hill and think that around the curve we would find a flat or downhill slope, but nope, there were always steeper hills to come, again and again, never ending. Many people skip the walking the island bit of the trip, just take a boat to the north, see the ruins, and take a boat to the south before returning to Copacabana, but you don’t really get to experience the area that way. Along the entire trail, we were the only people there, aside from the occasional locals we crossed path with. The little towns were not touristy, they just had cute little houses, kids playing in the yard or walking home from school.
At one particularly difficult uphill stretched, I stopped along the side to rest and a little girl of five or six came up to me and said something that I didn’t understand. I spoke to her in Spanish, but she didn’t understand me, simply grabbed my hand and then held onto my arm with all her might using both of her hands. I didn’t know what she wanted, maybe was just excited to see a foreigner, but she kept smiling and giggling away. I tried to tell her I had to keep walking, so she walked with me for a little bit, still clinging tightly to my arm. We came upon some other girls who were a little bit older and one of them spoke a small amount of Spanish. I found out that they spoke Aymara, one of the two traditional languages of people in the area. The girls weren’t dressed in typical attire, but all of the women were – they have long ruffled skirts, a brimmed hat, a buttoned sweater, and either a shawl around their shoulders or a blanket filled with items tied in a certain way and carried on their back. Later that day, I passed a little girl who must have wanted to carry a pack like the other women were, but hers held only a teddy bear. Anyway, I couldn’t communicate much with the girls because they didn’t know much Spanish, but I pulled myself away by giving them each a stick of gum – they had never seen one before, but it seemed like they understood my phrases and motions to chew the gum, not eat it or swallow it.
We eventually reached the southern end of the island and the community of Yumani, where we dumped our bags at the first hostel we saw, eager to at least get rid of some weight. We then headed down to the ruins at the southern end. We were told that it would take 30 minutes to get there so thought okay, that’s nothing compared to all that we have walked today. It was a really steep walk, heading mostly downhill with a very unstable path – my legs felt like they were going to buckle, but at least I could breathe, unlike on all the uphill bits. We kept going round and round the hills until we finally got there, but were dreading having to walk all the way back up. The ruins there weren’t nearly as nice as the Chicana ruins, but it was still a pretty well formed building. There were several doors, each of which went into one room and then connected to one or two other rooms that were pitch black because they had no windows or doors open to the outside. They had indented areas for windows and doors and I felt my way around and stepped into the entry way of some of the doors, but then just got stuck at a stone wall and had to turn around. I don’t know what the significance of the building was, my book doesn’t say much about it, but it seems to go by many different names; I’ll look it up later. We had gone through an open gate to get into the ruins, but going out, we found that the gate was bolted shut and no one was around. The only option was to hop the gate, which was made of really unstable wood. I climbed over the gate no problem, but my jacket didn’t want to come along and the back of it got stuck on one of the posts. Somehow, that made the zipper in front pop off completely – I need to find someone with pliers somewhere to snap it back on, I can slide it back on but it won’t stay because the sides are open too wide. Zippers are such fun… The hike back was pretty hard and my legs started going out on me so I stumbled a couple times but eventually made it to the top and collapsed into my bed for a bit. We went outside to watch the sunset for as long as we could bear in the freezing cold, and then went into a restaurant to get dinner. I wanted to get a quinoa veggie cheese dish and asked the owner of the restaurant if it was vegetarian and she said no, it had meat – then why didn’t the menu list that? There was a vegetarian pizza on the menu so we split that – the things on top were pretty much straight from a salad – cucumber, tomato, green beans, herbs, and tons of cheese. Walking outside, we could see every star in the sky – I hadn’t seen a sky like that since my kayak trip to Bahia de los Angeles in Baja four years ago. Got my headlamp to walk an Israeli girl who had joined us for dinner back to her hostel since it was pitch black, and then collapsed into my bed. In total, we walked about 20km during the day, from 10:30am until 5:30pm.
This morning, had muesli with fruit and yogurt again for breakfast, but instead of the typical puffy grain cereal, it was cocoa puffs, strange! We wanted to see the last of the ruins on the island, the Incan stairs, which were on the way to the port. They were ridiculously disappointing – it was just a set of stone stairs that had clearly been touched up along the way, and it was the path that everyone used to get from the port up into the hills – if I didn’t know it was ruins, I would have thought it was just another set of stairs. At the start of the stairs on the bottom, there were two sculptures of Incan warriors, painted colorfully but clearly done very recently. Had to wait for quite a while for the boat to come – usually, they board people 15 minutes early, but even though there were a ton of boats just sitting there doing nothing, we didn’t board until 20 minutes after we had to leave. Still need to get used to Bolivian time. Bought my bus ticket to La Paz, got my luggage, and here I am now on the way back. Soon, we will pass again through the point where we have to get off and our bus takes its own ferry across a portion of the lake.