Living in Peru : your everyday companion

Block Island writer visits the island of Amantani in Peru’s Lake Titicaca

By Jen Lighty
The Block Island Times

After ten years of contemplative Block Island winters, I finally took that trip to the Andes I’ve been talking about (for 10 years). Much to my surprise, the magnificent mountains were not my favorite place in Peru. Rather, I found myself enchanted with Amantani, an island in Lake Titicaca, which, at seven square kilometers, is just a little bigger than Block Island.

I began my trip with a visit to the home of former Block Island residents Rosalee and Peruko Ccopacatty. Peruko, a native of the area surrounding Lake Titicaca, told me that South America is 50 years behind the United States in both positive and negative ways.

As far as issues of healthcare, environmentalism and poverty goes, the U.S. would seem to be more advanced, but in my opinion, Peru is far ahead of us in tranquility, with Amantani (no phones, Internet or hot water, and limited electricity) being the most tranquil and relaxed place I have ever encountered. This is even more impressive considering that my visit coincided with one of the biggest events of the year, the Festival of the Virgin of Candelaria, when the locals don their spangled finery and dance to brass bands for hours in the town plaza in praise of the Virgin Mary.

I couldn’t help comparing this peaceful place with my home island, and wondered if there was more than this literal and metaphorical 50 years that separated Block Island from its South American sister. As we all know, Block Island faces more pressure from tourism every year, and while we can’t, of course, turn back the clock 50 years, I thought there might be some secrets to Amantani’s success at maintaining tranquility that might offer us insights or solutions to our problems on Block Island.

Slow-speed ferry

My comparison begins with getting there. For the 35 years that I have known Block Island, ferry service has increased in both speed and quantity. I remember waiting for the old Manitou, “The Daddy Boat” in the early ’70s with my mom and brother. It seemed enormous, but compared to today’s ferries it seems like an ancient, creaking relic barely safe to set to sea in. Now, in summer, we have high-speed ferry service, which zips people to the island in half an hour many times a day (although ferry service in winter can still be a little inconvenient).

Getting to Amantani is not easy at all. There is only one public place to embark, the dock in Puno Harbor. The boats are old wooden cabin cruisers with diesel engines, which chug along at a pace that isn’t fast enough to raise a wake. It’s a three-and-a-half hour cruise to cover the 15 kilometers to the island. Since no one was in a rush to get there, we stopped at one of the floating islands of the Uros.

The Uros are an indigenous tribe from the lake who live on islands of compacted tortora reeds, rather like our cattails. They make their boats out of these reeds, and also eat them. Cattails are also edible and were used by Block Island’s indigenous people, the Manisses, for food and to make baskets and build wigwams for shelter.

As many of you know, shelter can be hard to come by in the height of summer. It is essential to have a reservation on Block Island in July and August when the hotels and bed-and-breakfasts quickly fill. This is not the case on Amantani, which receives, from what I could tell, about 20 to 30 visitors a day — a mere two or three boatloads.

The visitors, though, unlike Block Island, which for the most part attracts tourists from the Northeast, were quite international. On my small boat there were travelers from the United States, Belgium, Chile, Uruguay, Australia, Canada, Spain and Colombia.

We were met at the docks by island women, young and old, dressed in black, bell-shaped skirts and white shirts embroidered with bright kantuta flowers and birds. The kantuta, a fuchsia flower shaped like a bell, is Amantani’s version of the beach rose, spilling over stonewalls all over the island. Visitors pay 10 soles (about $3) for a room and full board, and stay with island families on a rotating system so that everyone gets a chance to earn money as a host.

Unlike the Andean women I had encountered so far, who wear felt bowler hats to guard their eyes from the harsh sun, the women of Amantani wore long black headcloths, embroidered with bright-colored thread. Needless to say, their clothing and comportment was extremely modest, although when it was warm enough, their legs were visible from just below the knee down. When cold, they were covered with leg warmers.

One thing both islands have in common is the prevalence of rubber shoes. On Block Island, flip-flops are standard attire. In Peru, rural people wear shoes made from recycled tires.

All similarities stop there. I bought a pair and they were extremely uncomfortable compared to the ergonomically designed kicks we are accustomed to in the U.S. Peruvian flip-flops have no arch support and are nailed together with actual nails, which poke wearers in the heel. I suspect that if they could afford them, most Peruvians would be glad for a pair of hiking boots.

Sharing the wealth

Now that the subject of poverty has risen its ugly head, I can state with pleasure that Amantani, of all the places I have seen in Peru — aside from the swank neighborhoods of Lima — is the only place that did not seem to be suffering from the demoralizing effects of struggling for life’s basic needs: food, clothing and shelter. Like most places in rural Peru, the houses are built of adobe, a mixture of dirt, straw and water shaped into bricks and stacked together to form walls.

Roofs are often of thatch, though on Amantani I saw many houses with fiberglass roofs. While fiberglass may not be so good for the environment, I could tell that its use on Amantani signified a material wealth I had not seen elsewhere in Peru, and wondered how this came about. All the houses had tidy looking outhouses out back I wouldn’t be horrified to use. In my experience so far outhouses had been quite a commodity, if around at all. When I hiked up to a remote mountain village in the Sacred Valley my friend and I were told to go outside with the sheep, dogs, donkeys, cows and llamas whenever we felt the call of nature.

“It’s very natural here,” our host joked, and I wished, like the animals we were called upon to imitate, that I could be so unselfconscious.

The material prosperity, it turns out, comes from tourism. Like Block Island, the residents of Amantani benefit from tourist dollars, although, being a culture of subsistence farmers, they do not rely on this income to survive. Every spare inch of Amantani is planted with crops, mostly potatoes and corn. That, combined with fish from Lake Tititaca, would be enough to sustain the island’s 4,000 inhabitants if the tourists disappeared.

I did not get the sense that I was necessary on Amantani and, because of this, I suspect, I didn’t get the feeling — as sometimes occurs on Block Island — that I was resented. I was simply a visitor who was making life a little more comfortable. In this traditional society, I was also a curiosity, someone to ask about the outside world, which happened when my friend and I were invited to have lunch with a group of local construction workers. As we shared their simple and satisfying meal of corn, beans and potatoes, they asked us about the World Trade Center in New York City. They wanted to know if a new building had been constructed on the site.

I wondered how and why Amantani had managed to hold on to its innocence in such a graceful way. It turns out that when tour operators from Puno first began ferrying visitors to the island, the elders saw the potential negative impacts this influx of money could have on the tightly-woven fabric of the island, and proposed a communal plan in which money would be shared throughout the community.

The five sole ($1.50) landing fee is shared by the entire island. From what I could see, aside from upkeep of individual homes, the money was used to build beautiful stone walkways, decorated with mosaics, up to the ruins on the tops of the two highest hills on the island. Built in honor of Pachamama (Mother Earth) and Pachatata (Father Earth) by the pre-Incan Tiahuanaco culture, these ancient temples are still used to honor these deities by the local population. There was also a spectacular sports stadium that looked like a Greek amphitheater where local kids could play soccer like pros.

As I mentioned earlier, my visit coincided with the Festival de la Virgen del Carmen, known as Groundhog Day in the United States. It is a time to give thanks for the return of light in many cultures. In European pagan cultures it was, and is, a time to celebrate the fertility of the goddess as spring awakens with all its verdant bounty.

Let’s just say that, on Amantani, Candelaria is like the Fourth of July on Block Island. The whole island gets together and has a huge party, complete with costumes, fireworks and raucous music for days. All 4,000 residents clustered in the Plaza des Armas in the main village dressed in fabulous costumes, swilling cerveza and dancing to the brass bands, which played well into the night and began again early in the morning.

What can we learn?

As soon as the boat pulled away from shore, I thought about what Block Island could learn from this sister island in Lake Titicaca. With no cars, phones, airplanes, loud ferries and star-obscuring electric lights, Amantani is the most tranquil place I have ever experienced. The spirit of cooperation encouraged and fostered by the islands’ far-seeing elders has created a culture in which everyone shares resources, where the good of the whole is more important than the benefit of the individual.

This is not the customary way of thinking in the United States, and I must admit that, as a person who values my right to express myself as an individual, I would chafe at the restrictions that naturally come about when one has to live for the good of the whole. This would be especially true if I was a woman on Amantani. From my vantage point, women seemed relegated to having babies, taking care of animals, farming, cooking and weaving. I would want to be out on the lake fishing or off on the remote side of the island meditating in a cave when I should be tending the sheep or potatoes.

I mention these things so as not to idealize this place, but to try to see it through as wide a lens as possible. Of course, a culture of people raised to value the good of the whole over the desires of the individual most likely would not consider their prescribed roles as restrictions, but as their contribution to society, and we on Block Island have a far more complex set of issues to deal with at this point in our development.

But I think all of us who live, or even visit, Block Island, would do well to consider how we could learn from this truly unspoiled place that values the needs of the group over the needs of the individual. We would do well to listen to the voices of our elders.

While we no longer have an indigenous population, the Manisses having been exterminated in the 19th century, we can still connect with the indigenous wisdom within ourselves by listening to the wind and waves and stones, by looking into the eyes of children who want us to choose a future where Block Island truly earns its name as one of the world’s last great places.