At the Copacabana – Bolivia

By Alli Sinclair

I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for pristine lakes with snow-capped peaks. Not only are they a photographer’s and hiker’s paradise, they bring a sense of peace to this chaotic world, especially after visiting some of South America’s busiest cities.

The first time I visited Lake Titicaca, I traveled from the Bolivian side. I’d journeyed from La Paz and was looking forward to finding solace from the horns, pollution, and swarming bodies of a busy city. Being the girly-swat that I am, I’d studied the history of the lake, pored over countless photos (no Internet back then), and created visions of this majestic lake in my mind. I’d imagined a stunning body of water but no matter how fruitful my imagination, I wasn’t prepared for the reality – Lake Titicaca rivaled some of the most beautiful lakes I’d ever seen (and that was saying a lot, especially after hiking through the Indian and Nepalese Himalayas).

Straddling the border of Bolivia and Peru, Lake Titicaca is the highest commercially navigable lake in the world and is rich in history, beauty, and politics. The name Titicaca translates as Puma Rock, a name given by the Incas who believed the lake looked like a puma chasing a rabbit.

Even though Bolivia is a land-locked country, the majority of the country’s naval force is based at Lake Titicaca. The navy employs 2,000 personnel, has a naval school, and they own 173 vessels that patrol large rivers as well as this gorgeous lake. Bolivians believe one day they’ll regain the land they lost to Chile during the War of the Pacific (1879-1884) and this hope is so strong Bolivians celebrate the Dia del Mar (Day of the Sea) every year and ask Chile to give back Bolivia’s lost land. Perhaps one day, they might get a yes.

Copacabana is a village on the shores of the lake and is close to the Peruvian border. Sure, it has a beach, but it isn’t quite in the same realm as Rio’s Copacabana – there are no men or women wearing swimmers that disappear up their bottom, no tanned athletic bodies, and certainly no surf. But this sleepy town has it’s own uniqueness, especially when it comes to dining. I’ve never been a fan of trout but when I tried the fish pulled out from the lake only a couple of hours earlier, I quickly became a convert.

It’s worth staying in Copacabana for at least a couple of days to hike the trails leading to mountaintops that offer unsurpassed views of the lake and Andes, as well as discovering Inca ruins that can only be accessed by foot. And a must-see is the Basilica of Our Lady Copacabana, the patron saint of Bolivia. It’s easy to overdose on beautiful churches in Latin America so if you only intend to visit a handful, put this one up the top of the list.

Framed by bright blue skies, the whitewashed walls of the church make a spectacular entrance into this gorgeous house of God. It is believed the church was built on the Incan Temple of Fertility of Kotakawana, reinforcing Copacabana as a sacred place well before the Spanish arrived.

Legend has it that in 1576 some fishermen were caught in a terrible storm on Lake Titicaca. They prayed for help and the Virgin Mary appeared, leading them to safety. To show their gratitude they built a shrine in her honor. Another story is about Tito Yupanqui, a man who dreamed about the sailors and the appearance of the Virgin Mary. He was so affected by the dream that he travelled to Potosi to learn how to sculpt. He hand-carved the Virgin from cactus wood and carried his creation on his back across the 400 miles from Potosi. The sculpture was placed in the church and it is said that those who didn’t believe in the Virgin’s powers soon experienced crop loss. In the 1800s, another image of the Virgin was created and taken to Brazil’s most famous beach – Copacabana.

If you happen to be in the neighborhood around February 2-5 (it happens every year), stay for the celebrations that attract people from all over the world. The Fiesta de la Virgen de Candelaria has Aymara dancers from the region, plenty of music played by traditional bands, and lots of dancing, drinking, and eating. New vehicles, including trucks adorned with bling, are blessed with beer out the front of the church. On the third day of the fiesta 100 bulls are placed in a stone corral and brave (ie very drunk) revelers jump into the arena and try to avoid being gored.

Luckily, I had enough sense to avoid the bulls, but being included by the locals and dancing the days away is an experience I’ll always treasure. It’s been ten years since my last trip to this beautiful lake and I’m well overdue for another visit. Perhaps 2013 will be the year of returning to my favorite places in the world. I guess I’d better buy that lottery ticket…

What's The Word?

Bilingual road signs in Corsica with
the French names crossed out and
the Corsu names showing beneath them.
UNESCO classifies Corsu as a potentially
endangered language. (Photo by skender)

Did you know the plural for “wife” in Spanish is esposas, which also happens to mean handcuffs? Or that in Korea, the word for “sweetheart” is the same as the one for “self” (chagi). What do these examples say about the cultures they hail from, or do they mean anything at all?

I love learning word trivia, particularly when it makes me think about cultural roots, histories, psychology, and etymology. There’s a term for this in the linguistics field, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which basically says your language affects your world view.

Consider what some of these vignettes might say about their cultures:

• Pirahã is an ancient language spoken by an indigenous people who live along a tributary, the Maici River, along the Amazon. Pirahãs themselves number only between 250 and 380 speakers, and it’s believed they’re monolingual. As well, theirs is a “language isolate,” which means it has no known connection to any other living languages.

What’s fascinating is how simple Pirahãs keep things. They have the fewest words to describe kinship than any other culture. The word baíxi represents both mother and father (essentially meaning parent), and they don’t have words to represent any other relatives beyond their immediate siblings. (Talk about a nuclear family!) They use the same word for the numbers one and two, distinguished only by the tone in which the word is spoken; all other numbers are represented as either a few or many. Pirahãs don’t have words for colors either, distinguishing them only as light or dark.

• Aymara, the ancient indigenous language of the Andes (spoken by more than two million in Bolivia, Peru, and Chile), has a unique and rare expression of time. It doesn’t have a future tense but instead represents the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. While that sounds confusing and perhaps impossible, consider expressions in English: “Let’s prepare for what lies before us” or “We face an uncertain future.”

• In Indonesia, verbs never change to express time. Whether it happened before, is happening now, or will happen later, the verb tense remains the same. On the other hand, the Yagua language of Peru uses five verb tenses – one for something that happened within the last few hours, one for the day before, another for something that occurred within the past few weeks, another for an occurrence at least two months ago but less than a couple years, and another for anything that happened longer ago than that.

• Speakers of Japanese and Spanish are thought to base their verb tenses on intent. If you meant to do it, you “pushed” a cup off the table. But if you did it accidentally, “it fell” (so presumably you had nothing to do with it). I’m not sure this is as rare a linguist feature as it might sound. We use a lot of passive voice in English as well, especially when trying to deflect blame. Think of official corporate statements and government speak.

• About a third of the world’s languages have no concept of right or left. Instead, they use directional language (east, west, south, north) for everything. We might lay out a series of photos, for example, from left to right (or as Hebrew speakers might explain it, right to left.) But many cultures would describe them as west to east. One reason is because navigation is so much more important in these cultures than for us. For example, even small children of the Australian aboriginals, the Thaayores, learn early how to find their way around.

• In English, blue describes an overall color. In Russian, there’s no one word encompassing the color but numerous words for shades of it (such as light, very light, dark, navy, steel, etcetera). 

• In fact, many languages do not distinguish between the colors blue and green (such as Thai, Welsh, and the African language, Tswana) or have a single word that can describe either (as in Korean and Chinese). In Vietnamese, both the sky and the leaves of a tree are xanh (pronounced “grue”). They might say “leaf grue” or “ocean grue” to distinguish the shade, but the overall color is still the same. In Japanese, the word for blue (ao) is often used for the word many English speakers would think of as green (such as the color representing “go” on a traffic signal).

• Some languages use gender to describe things, though not consistently across languages. So in German, the word for moon is male and sun female, while French, Spanish, and Hindi use the inverse, with a female moon and a male sun. In other languages, such as Farsi, pronoun articles are gender neutral. Then there are those, such as Danish, where articles can be male, female, or neutral. And curiously, gender-free objects in Danish can take either of two kinds of articles: en (the equivalent of “an” in English) or et (“it”) and den or det (as in “the” or “it”). As one Dane told me, “there’s no rhyme or reason for it—you just have to memorize which one to use.”

Know any other language trivia you can add to the list?