Three days with the Uros Tribe

For three days we spent our time in a rental house of the Uros people on Lake Titicaca in Peru. They have been living here for almost four thousand years and we got to live and learn what they go through every day.

The Urus tribe is a very diverse group of people who live on approximately one-hundred and twenty self made floating islands made out of a special plant called the torta reed on lake Titicaca. The work that the Uros put into this is very thoughtful, every four years they redo their floating islands with the help of other Uros members. They do this so all of their belongings, houses, and even them do not sink into the water and drown. Every week in the process they lay down a new layer of torta reeds across their entire area, they do it layer by layer so the reeds have time to compact and to get thick enough to hold all of the Uros belongings.

The layering of the basin is very complex, the bottom of the layers (the deepest layer) is full of buoyant roots which is about one to two meters that are all tied up into bundles, these are anchored to the bottom of the lake by long eucalyptus poles. The surface layers are multiple layers of cut up and dried torta reeds and laying them in a crisscross pattern above the roots that are anchored to the bottom. Due to the rotting of the torta layers under the water, they continuously add a new fresh layer of dried torta reeds on top of the rotten ones so that the rotten ones are always being restored by new fresh ones. This concludes the layering of the Uros tribes floating islands.

While we where here on these islands we did a lot of fishing because the Uros people depend heavily on fish, that fish being rainbow trout and these are different that back home in the US these ones get up to nine kilos so much bigger that the ones back home. We did not catching any of these monsters but we did catch a special fish only found there in lake Titicaca, the Killi fish. They use these to catch a different species of fish to the use whole to catch the big trout. Other than fishing there was not much to do other than sleeping and playing uno with one of the Uro kids and eating. For food it was a good amout of trout that was fried or in a special soup they make there, and besides that in was eatheir cuped noodles or chicken tenders. We also went to do a tour of other floating island and learned about them and got to also go into some of them. Other than this, we did not do too much but this was still a very amazing experience and I would highly recommend it.