Then You See It, Now You Don’t

It’s one of these rare places on Earth as recognised as it is obscure. Lake Titicaca is surprisingly well known for something so well hidden by virtue of being, well, so high in the sky. But there’s no fooling the satellites, and what they beam down is a view of some deep impression left baked into the tan-brown spine of the Andes. The puddle that once overflowed it is now an ancestral footprint of a world of slayed giants, long after the rain has gone. I wonder what secrets she’ll give up when eventually the puddle dries up completely. Will those same satellites beam images back of great cracks in the rafters of South America? Abandoned thrones over which Gods once presided? The wishbones of leviathans snapped by superstitious creators? Near the end of time will man say, in this place was once a great lake where magic brewed, boiled and bubbled? Where Gods made suns and suns made the first man and woman, born stewed, toiled and troubled?

Did You Find Me, or Did I Find You?

For now that blue eye in the sky between Peru and Bolivia still exudes magic. Where others struggled to point, as a kid obsessed with the physical world I faced down that map of the world and prodded right at the X. Titicaca, there’s no hiding from my beady eye. In hindsight, it was my way of saying,

‘Don’t you go evaporating because one of these days I’m coming for you.’

It only took nearing thirty years of travelling to other Titicacas before the real thing found me wandering life’s lost highway. And now Titicaca is gone from sight, tucked away behind that annular world of rock and sky, she hasn’t really gone anywhere other than shrink inch by inch. As the lake was with me from the start, so she shall be to the end. And beyond. Maybe so far beyond that my ashes will linger longer than her vapours.

Early Onset Titicaca Syndrome

I might have mentioned, There’s not a time i can recall not knowing of the lake. Maybe it was the name itself banded around like M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i in the corridors of primary school. The hee-hee and ka-ka onomatopoeia of a laughing jackass, the repetition of the phonemes -ti and -ca, so alien to my English mother tongue. And the familiarity just deepened, breeding not contempt but a certain fascination. Ferocious battles of Trivial Pursuit at the tender age of ten taught me that Titicaca was Earth’s highest navigable body of water. That cool factoid stayed lodged in my hippocampus, planting some seed in the drifting dunes of the mind that would one day bring ephemeral rain enough to germinate that seed into an apparition of the lake itself. I could have sworn it was the real thing, though these days you never can tell.

The Old Ones Are The Best

Hands down, Lake Titicaca is stocked with knockout trivia the way Lake Malawi is stocked with cichlids. Off the bat, it’s where the supreme god Viracocha created the first man (and presumably woman, given that we’re all still here). But more importantly for their selfless service to all life on Earth compared with selfish man and woman, he sent up the sun and the moon from the dark waters. The sun, who went by the name of Inti, then ordered forth his two little suns, Manco Copac and Mama Ocllo (presumably more daughter than sun) to put Man, who was not only selfish but wayward, on the righteous path to Inca-dom. So they set forth over the primordial Altiplano to found Cusco, on a now well worn – if sublime – route covered by both the tourist bus and train between Puno and the aforesaid capital of the Inca’s Pan-Andean empire.

But Titicaca doesn’t even start with the same waist measurements, nor with those time-lost legends of Gods and monsters. Too many of us start skinny and move ever outward around the girth; the lake did the opposite. I read that about 12,000 years ago, when Göbekle Tepe was wowing forager crowds and ice was on the retreat from gigantic Andean glaciers, what now covers 8,370km2 between the modern political constructs we call Peru and Bolivia drowned a much larger area, was at least a hundred feet deeper, creating a liquid landscape bigger than my imagination. Think of it as a rooftop pool not just for Viracocha, but an infinity rooftop (of the world) pool for all the Incan pantheon. Now that’s a big pool of meltwater, all consecrated, it goes without saying.

But alas! Things ain’t what they used to be. In today’s balmy Holocene, all that’s left is a slow-disappearing puddle a few hundred feet deep about the size of Puerto Rico. Still, not to be sniffed at.

 

Ticking off the Ash Bucket List

Ever asked yourself where you’d like those ashes scattered when you are no more? I’ve roamed around looking for ideal ‘eternity’ spots rather like first-time buyers viewing properties in the housing market. In fact, I’ve been crying, ‘this must be the place!’, since the first time I crossed the Oakland Bridge as a greenhorn globetrotter of tender twenty-two and saw San Francisco shimmering like Oz before my very eyes. I was in love with it then and I’m in love with it now. There’s eternity spot #1. But who’s to say one’s vial of earthly remains have to be tipped out in the same place?

Why not entrust a dear friend, or maybe a kindly stranger, to sprinkle a little bit of yourself in more than one hotspot you visited and fell head over heels for? Call it a breadcrumbs trail of your brief appearance on this beautiful blue planet, there for your reincarnate self to rediscover on the great wheel of time.

 

Leave A Little Piece of You Wherever You’ve Gone

In Puno, Peru’s port town on the shore’s of Titicaca, I got the idea for this grand post-mortal plan. On the bus from Cusco i met two of the very few Englishman I found in three months of travelling this land north to south. Affable Liverpudlians, they too were heading to Titicaca for a special reason. One of them, the one not married to the Peruvian girl, was carrying valuable cargo. So priceless it could fit in his pocket; so symbolic it brought him all the way to the Southern Hemisphere.

His dad had died a couple of years prior. The man’s dying wish was that his son would ration his ashes, setting aside enough to be able to scatter in a number of his favourite locations around the world. One such spot was Titicaca, though strangely i don’t think he had ever been there himself. Rather, he died with this long-harboured dream unfulfilled. So his son grasped the initiative. He and his friend took a boat from Puno to Isla Taquille – Avalon in the middle of the lake – and on the way there tipped the vial into inky waters of Titicaca. It was there he could say a final farewell to his father. It was there his father’s 21-gramme soul could say an initial hello to this lake so big and so mystical it could be a freshwater sea sailed by the sky people. There was something truly Arthurian about this tale. A power that never left me.

 

Beaches Where Clouds Ought To Be

Picture yourself on a beach, but no ordinary beach. Picture yourself instead on a soft, sandy beach on an isle ringed with clouds in the middle of Lake Titicaca, at 12,507ft above the bigger cousin of this sea way down there where the world’s intractable problems are deepening by the day. Imagine mountaintops in plain sight, yet so distant I’m not even going to guess how. Visualise a dirty storm front gathering over starboard waters on your Titicaca vessel when on the port side hills are bathed in pure sunlight. Stop and consider for a moment sleeping on a double bed in a floating lodge atop a huge, anchored raft of totora reeds 15ft thick. Being essentially grass this mythical totora, with which the proto-Inca built their distinctive canoes with their curlicue prow, is continuously waterlogged. If the Uro people, who have presumably lived this way since time immemorial, are to avoid a sailor’s death by sinking into 50ft of water, these totora reed mats need re-thatching every fortnight. Can you imagine having to re-thatch a Cotswolds cottage roof every two weeks? I’ve seen the sea peoples of the Andaman. I’ve seen the Junk-dwellers of Canton. Hell, I live on a boat myself. But I’ve seen nothing like this. No, the lake doesn’t add up. And that’s precisely why it does. And that’s why I want my ashes scattered there. Or at least a pinch of them.