Picking up from The Andean Baroque Route to Puno: Roadside Statues, Frescos and a Concrete Snake. The series starts here: Peru and Bolivia: The Andes, the Altiplano and the World’s Most Dangerous Road.

Floating Village

El Burrito had carried us the length of Peru without complaint. Pablo’s 4Runner — dusty, faithful — was handed back as clean as we could manage, which was not very clean.

Lake Titicaca is genuinely large — the biggest lake in South America by volume, and, at close to 3,812 metres, the highest lake in the world that still carries commercial boat traffic. Flat, high, cold, and a shade of blue that sits somewhere between sky and turquoise depending on the light. The boat threaded through channels of golden totora reed.

The floating islands of the Uros are made entirely of those reeds — cut, layered, then relayered as the bottom rots away. Each island is anchored to the lakebed with ropes and eucalyptus stakes, and can, in theory, be moved — historically a useful trait when the neighbours got difficult. The island surface, the houses, the boats: all the same material, endlessly renewed, in a practice that long predates the Inca and was born, so the story goes, of wanting to keep some distance from more powerful neighbours on the mainland. A man demonstrated the construction. The community has solar panels now. The toilet is a long drop into the lake. The lake is also the drinking water.

They offered totora reed to chew — fibrous, faintly sweet. The children attend school on the island. For high school, they paddle themselves to the mainland.

Back on the boat, Janine thought the village had another generation, maybe two. The kids, once they see the mainland, are not always keen to return.

Taquile Island

Further out on the lake: Taquile Island, population around 2,200, its textile tradition recognised by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of Intangible Heritage, running back centuries and with its own social rules built right into the thread.

The women weave belts — twelve months of the year encoded in the pattern. The men knit the hats, learning on five needles from age eight. The tighter the knit, the stronger the marriage prospects. It is, apparently, taken seriously. The wool is washed first with saqta, a local plant crushed on stone and used as soap. It works.

The walk to lunch was 500 steps uphill at 3,800 metres. The guide picked leaves from a plant beside the track — muña, a native herb — crushed them and held them out to smell. Said to make the climb easier. It did.

Lunch was grilled trout, straight from the lake, eaten in the sun above the water. The lake was very blue from up there. The kind of blue that doesn’t quite look real — and, after a week of altiplano dust, a genuine relief to look at.