The only place to spend the night afloat Lake Titicaca in Peru is on a 150-year-old British gunboat, now a B&B, with a remarkable history ? and it only costs �24 a night
At home, in my kitchen, sits a battered red book. Faded gold lettering on the spine spells out the title: The South American Handbook 1930, the direct ancestor of today's backpacker guide.
It is the longest-running travel guide in the English language, but open the pages of the 1930 edition and you enter a vanished world: "There are regular direct sailings between the River Plate and the Port of Manchester," promises one advertisement. "Casino: the premier music hall of South America, composed exclusively of high-class turns proceeding from the most important halls of London, Paris and Berlin," urges another.
But the most beguiling pages of all describe a journey it was once possible to make, and which I wish I could do now. It beats buses and planes and hitched lifts on South American lorries hands down.
In 1930, a Pullman sleeping car ran from Buenos Aires, departing Retiro station twice a week, direct to La Paz in Bolivia. This vast journey ? "veritably across the roof of the world", says the guide ? took four days. Trains zigzagged up the canyon in which Bolivia's capital sits, arriving at a station designed by Gustave Eiffel ? the man who built the Paris tower. The tracks were pulled up for scrap long ago and today the terminus lingers on as the city's bus station.
But in 1930, steam trains were waiting to continue the journey down to the shores of Lake Titicaca, the great inland sea, high in the Andes. And from there, steam boats carried passengers across to Peru, to be met by another train which would take them down to the Pacific, or across the mountains to the Inca capital, Cusco.
"There are thrills as the shriek of the whistle and the grinding of the brakes tell that the driver is trying to stop his train before it runs over some Indian driving his pack mule," says my 1930 guide.
Does anything of this splendid journey remain today? In Peru and Bolivia this summer I attempted to find out. Glancing at my modern South American handbook, I could see that the romance has gone. There are no trains to La Paz; few trains, either, in Argentina. But Lake Titicaca looked promising: a train still runs from Cusco to Puno, on the shores of Titicaca. Fifteen years ago I travelled the route, sitting on the steps below an open door, my feet dangling over the passing track. It is still a fine journey but now rather more expensive, as the line is run by Peru Rail, a private company part-owned by luxury travel group Orient Express.
On this visit I took the bus up from the coast to Puno. It is grim, a modern Peruvian city of concrete shacks and traffic, the worst of introductions to the best of lakes. At almost 4,000 metres the lake is renowned as the highest navigable stretch of water in the world, but that description doesn't begin to capture the oddity of what seems a small ocean in the sky, rimmed on its far shore by the great mountains of the Bolivian Andes, their glaciers shining pink in the setting sun.
In search of relics from that long-lost South America described in my guide, I found something magnificent. The pier from which steam ships once departed is derelict, but the ships themselves mostly survive. By far the most wonderful is the Yavari, now moored just outside the town, a boat with a remarkable story.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of its commissioning, and next year the ship will celebrate its arrival in South America. It was built as a gunboat on the Thames in London in 1862 ? on board you can still see the original receipt ? then boxed up in pieces and sent around Cape Horn as cargo. It took six years to transport all the sections of the boat to the lake, carried over the Andes by llama and on horseback, reassembled by English engineers and finally launched in 1870. No ship can ever have taken more effort to build.
The Yavari is an elegant boat, now the oldest propeller-driven working ship in the world ? as historic in its own way as the Cutty Sark, and as old. It was fuelled for its first 40 years by dried llama dung ? there being no local coal ? and carried passengers until the late 1950s, before road travel stole its trade.
The Yavari almost didn't survive. It was rescued by an amazing Englishwoman, Meriel Larken, who bought the remains of the ship in the 1990s and has led a team of Peruvians who are working to save it. They have restored the great oil engine, installed in 1910, and polished the Victorian brass work and varnished wood cabins. The ship is waiting, in return for a donation, for anyone who wants to tour her.
You can stay on board, too, at what for my money is the best bed and breakfast in South America ? the only place it is possible to spend a night afloat on Lake Titicaca, two-and-a-half miles above sea level.
We walked up the long pier in the early afternoon to be met by a Peruvian crew piping us on board. Inside we found a small but spotlessly tidy cabin, with crisp white sheets embroidered with the ship's name. Through a porthole I could see Puno; less hideous from a distance.
The Yavari's captain, Giselle Guldentops, is as notable as her ship: the first female captain in the Peruvian merchant navy, she sailed the Pacific before coming to rest on the lake, in command of a vessel she hopes will soon be able to take tourists on day trips. The Yavari is in working order now, but needs �350,000 more work before it can be certified for passenger use. While funds are raised, it waits off Puno, hosting visitors for US$38 a night. You can order dinner ? wine too ? from a nearby hotel on shore.
As the sun vanished and a full moon rose over the lake ? the twin symbols of Inca religion ? we toasted the Yavari with pisco sours, Peru's national cocktail. It turned out to be the captain's birthday, so we toasted that too, on board a British ship on an Andean lake, in its third century of voyaging.
? Bed and breakfast on board Yavari (+51 51 369329, yavari.org) costs US$38pp per night
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/sep/07/yavari-lake-titicaca-peru-hotel-bandb
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