May 16, 20122 min read

Poster Board Dreams – Peru

A memory…BRIGHT RED poster board with thoughtfully placed National Geographic images adhered by glue from a rubber tipped brown glass bottle. Dark eyes and faint smiles, figures wrapped in crayola color telling of life on the highest navigable lake in the world. At 12 I tried to imagine how a man made balsa boat (actually it looked like women doing the making) just formed from reeds could hold a real person. Certainly your feet would break through and you would be swallowed by the lake whose name made us giggle.

Fast forward…I am headed to Peru on a return trip, but this time I am going to satisfy a 30 plus, some odd year old curiosity. The finale of my journey was going to take me to places I had to learn how to pronounce and where Irish pubs were strangely common place. We would travel through thin aired mountain passes at 16,000′ where wishes were strewn symboled by carefully built stones. Had they all come true? I made a wish…

Puno was our destination where Lake Titicaca spread out before us. The local Uru people, still live on floating mats of dried totora, a reed like papyrus that grows in dense brakes in the marshy shallows. From these reeds, the lake dwellers also make their famed balsa boats fashioned of bundles lashed together.

We were beckoned to an island by women skirted in pink and orange and turquoise blue. As I stepped down the reeds crunched. Would I sink? Surely my feet would get wet…A young woman takes my hand and leads me to her home. Needing to lower our heads we enter. One room, warm and cozy. Smiles are exchanged…