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WONDERS OF NATURE
Lake Titicaca. Nature miracle
In the South American Andes, one of the longest and most beautiful mountain ranges, there are two or three places that especially attract tourists with their unusualness and picturesqueness. This is the famous Road of Volcanoes in Ecuador - a mountain valley, surrounded on both sides by ranks of fire-breathing mountains. Of the thirty volcanoes of this stunning "alley", six are active today. Quite unlike the Ecuadorian valley, the southern end of the gigantic mountain range - the Andes of Tierra del Fuego. Here the landscape is more like New Zealand or Switzerland. Dense forests of beech and araucaria pines rise up the slopes of the mountains above narrow winding fjord bays and are reflected in the blue mirrors of glacial lakes. But the most interesting area of the Andes is, of course, the high-altitude Bolivian plateau, the central part of which is occupied by Lake Titicaca. This is the largest alpine lake in the world at an altitude of three thousand eight hundred meters and covers an area of more than eight thousand square kilometers. In the southern hemisphere, only the Great African Lakes are larger: Victoria, Tanganyika and Nyasa. The depth of the transcendental reservoir reaches almost four hundred meters.
To the east, only a dozen kilometers separate Titicaca from the steep snowy slopes of the mighty Cordillera Real, rising three kilometers above the lake. And on the opposite side, the alpine plateau gradually rises to the ridges of the Western Cordillera located more than a hundred kilometers to the east, which also rise above the intermountain basin by two to two and a half thousand meters. About a dozen mountain streams run off them to Titicaca. And the fast and stormy Desaguadero River flows out of it through a deep gorge, flowing through three hundred kilometers into the endorheic salt lake Poopo. In the lower reaches, it erodes the salt layers protruding along the banks, and therefore it flows into Poopo, the only salty river in the world. For the inhabitants of the Altiplano (as this desert and cold high-mountain plain is called), Titicaca is both a source of water, a supplier of food, and a giant "heater" that softens the climate of this homeless land - after all, the water temperature in the lake never drops below eleven degrees. It is no coincidence that man settled on the shores of the lake in ancient times - ten thousand years ago. Now it is divided between Peru and Bolivia, with the latter getting the arid west coast, and the Peruvians the wetter east. From the northwest to the southeast, Titicaca stretches for one hundred and eighty kilometers, and it reaches sixty kilometers in width. In the southern part, the lake is divided by the peninsulas of Copacabana and Uata into two reaches: Big and Small. They are connected by a short strait several hundred meters wide. The large stretch is surrounded by rocky shores. They drop steeply to the water, and the western coast is entirely composed of lavas that once erupted from the volcanoes of the Western Cordillera. This part of the reservoir is deeper. It was here, near the island of Soto, that the maximum depth of the lake was recorded - three hundred and eighty meters. The spacious stretch has room for the winds to roam, and, as a rule, strong waves rise on it in the afternoon. The small stretch, on the contrary, is shallow, no deeper than five meters, and therefore warms up better. Its gently sloping shores are bordered by thickets of totora reeds. The waters of this reach are teeming with fish and algae, and the coastal reeds are full of ducks. In addition to Soto, there are more than thirty islands on Titicaca, located mostly on the Great Reach. Two of them are considered sacred by the locals and have expressive names: Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) and Isla de la Luna (Island of the Moon). According to the legend of the Incas who inhabited these islands, they belonged to the sun god Titicaca and the moon god Coati. On the islands, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of ancient temples. According to legend, the son of the Sun, the Inca Manco Capac, and his sister Mama Oklio, the daughter of the Moon, were born here - the first rulers of the Inca Empire. The Sun God gave them a golden staff and sent them to the country of the shepherds to the north. In each valley along the way, the Inca plunged a golden staff into the ground, but everywhere he came across rocks. The Inca and her sister walked north for a long time until they reached the Cuzco valley. Here, as soon as the staff touched the soil, it immediately went deep into the arable land. Inca Manco Capac summoned shepherds from all over the north to the valley. Mama Oklio brought others from the south. Then together they founded the capital city of the new monarchy and in the center of it erected a temple to the God of the Sun. The new capital - Cusco - became the center of a powerful empire. Until the arrival of the Spaniards, it was headed by the heirs of Manco Capac. And only the Spanish conquistadors Francisco Pizarro, having defeated the Inca army, destroyed the great civilization of South America. Now the descendants of the Incas - the Aymara Indians - live in poor villages along the shores of Lake Titicaca, doing the same shepherd's craft that their ancestors did during the time of the Inca Manco Capac. In addition, they plant corn and vegetables on the fertile volcanic soils. And the most ancient inhabitants of the valley - the Uru Indians, who lived here nine thousand years ago, are now driven out by newcomers from the south to the Titicaca Islands. Moreover, these islands are not simple, but ... man-made. The Uru themselves build them from totora reeds, laying more and more layers as the lower stems of the reeds become soaked with water and rot. More precisely, reed islands form in nature themselves when individual stems grow together with rhizomes. The Indians could only use them as a basis for construction, expanding and strengthening these floating beds and periodically arranging "maintenance". On such islands there are entire villages in which almost all of this amazing lake people live - more than a thousand people. Totora provides almost all the needs of the uru: they build (or rather, weave) huts from it, they sleep and sit on reed mats, they also make hats and bags, curtains and toys from it. Only food (and this is mostly fish), at first glance, has nothing to do with this wonderful plant. However, in fact, even here it was not without totoras, since the islanders even make boats from sheaves of reeds, on which they fish in the lake. On a calm morning, Titicaca amazes the traveler who sees it with the absolute immobility of its strikingly blue mirror surface, in which the sky and mountains are surprisingly clearly reflected. When the sun begins to rise over the wall of the Cordillera Real, the lake suddenly lights up with a dazzling light, turning greenish-violet, and begins to shimmer with bright light stripes. In the daytime, when the luminary stands high in the sky, the banks of Titicaca seem to move apart in breadth, illuminated by the sun's rays, and the light gray surface of the lake contrasts especially sharply with the dark rocky slopes. And in the evening, a huge reservoir, flooded with the flames of sunset, is painted in ominous dark crimson tones. And this play of colors and shades is repeated daily, while there is calm. However, it is worth blowing fierce winds from the mountains, as real storms play out on the lake, crashing onto the shores with a roar and overturning fragile fishing boats. But travelers and scientists are attracted here not only by the harsh beauty of landscapes. A lot of mysterious and hitherto unsolved mysteries are connected with the alpine lake - historical, archaeological, biological and geological. And if archaeologists may someday be able to explain the origin of some carved stones, obviously delivered from afar, hundreds of kilometers away, or unusual boats, analogues of which are found only on the African Lake Chad and at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, then the mystery of the origin of Lake Titicaca itself seems to remain forever unsolved. It would seem that it could be simpler: a tectonic basin in the mountains created by underground forces collected the waters of mountain rivers, and a lake was formed. There are many such examples on Earth - this is how Issyk-Kul and Baikal, Tanganyika and Nyasa arose. But how then to explain the presence, albeit in a small amount, of sea salts in the waters of the lake, and in the same proportion as in the ocean? Where did the sea terraces with traces of the surf and the remains of marine organisms come from on the coastal slopes? These and many more facts suggest that Titicaca was once a sea bay, and then gigantic forces raised it for almost four kilometers. However, modern science cannot explain how this could happen. Geologists and archaeologists, historians and ethnographers, zoologists and botanists are struggling over the secrets of the mysterious lake. But there are still more questions that arise when studying Titicaca than there are answers. And for a long time travelers will be excited by the romance of unsolved mysteries and the laconic beauty of its landscapes, firmly embedded in the memory of the "pearl of the Andes", the sacred lake of the Incas - Titicaca. Author: B.Wagner
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