Brothers & Lakes

The hike out of Copacabana started out low and warm, hugging the lakeshore for a quarter mile past farms and sheep and fields, burned and charred. Lake Titicaca is at tremendous altitude and the sky was completely cloudless except for a few low puffy things far off on the other side of the water.

And far it was; the lake is an ocean, it's Great, it's Tahoe, it's seemingly endless and endlessly blue. Color seems more saturated at altitude - or so it seemed to me - and the sky and water swirled with hues so brilliant and intense that 'blue' or 'green,' single words, just can't do them justice. The sky and the water deserved whole phrases; they earned endless streams of adjectives.

We, the same Americans and I, were hiking to some small village to catch a ferry to the Isla del Sol. Like usual, I had no map - but I wasn't concerned; as it is in life, there's only one road. You just never know how long you're on it, that's all.

Well, we hiked - we must have, I was wearing my hiking pants. The road climbed around a mountain, and in between the pines and eucalyptus, the lake would suddenly spill into view; the vast and terrifying lake. You start at altitude and you gain some more, and the lakeshore, the far lakeshore is a dark arc of land, bright brown, maybe spotted a little, but bent around the lake and the curvature of the Earth itself. Below us, waves broke around rocks, less threatening now, leaving white trails of foam to float back out with the water.

After a long while, we started asking the few people on the road how much further we had to go. Some said an hour. Others said three minutes. Then some said four minutes, so at least those numbers matched, right? Of course they were all wrong, but what can you do? Maybe we just walked especially slowly.

Eventually we staggered into town, village really, and walked to the water's edge. The man there hustled for ferry passage to the Isla del Sol, stopping us in the middle of the lake and asking for money. He wasn't even upfront about it, saying he'd like to charge us less but his hands were tied; suddenly we're the bad guy for complaining. Bolivian business.

It was sunset on the other side of the island, but even near the top we were obscured by shadow from the ridge. I looked back across the water, but not in the direction I had come from, but farther east, at the white-capped mountain range and the moon, that celestial dinner plate, rising off the low hills. As it rose, the sky darkened into the bright blackness of a fullmoon night, and I settled down to dinner.