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‘ravelon, Jonathan van Bilsen a All pigs are not alike When travelling the globe, one has the great opportuni- ty of meeting people in the most remote places. This was recently the case when | was in a small village on Lake Titicaca, high on the Bolivian plateau. | had just arrived and was tired and aching from alti- tude sickness. | had been in the mountains of Peru and Bolivia for six days and the 5,000 metre altitude was tak- ing its toll. A constant headache throbbed at the back of my head and all | wanted to do was lay down. Instead | decided to go for a walk and enjoy some of the fresh air (what little there was of it). | came upon a giant reed boat sitting near the shore of the lake, beside a small, mud brick home. | walked around it several times and found it intriguing, but was not prepared for what hap- pened ne? an, in his seventies, came out to greet me. His English was very broken at best and | had difficulty in understanding him. He was explaining something about the boat and asked me to come inside his home. | did and was greeted by his wife, a pleasant woman who was knitting a sweater from alpaca wool. He introduced me to another man, whom he kept calling Demetrio Limachi, who turned out to be his brother. We chatted, at least they did and | nodded a great deal, until suddenly one of the men produced a National Geographic magazine from 1971. The cover story was about Thor Heyerdahl, the famous Norwegian explorer who, on board his craft the Kon-Tiki, set out in 1947 to rove h his theory of how people sailed from Africa to South “Ths i issue dealt with later voyages of Heyerdahl and his two boats the Ra and Ra II. Both ships were designed to explain how primitive people, using only the materials and technologies available to them at the time, crossed the Atlantic in reed boats carried only by the wind. | read the article with great interest and learned that the two men, standing in front of me, were two of the three Limachi brothers who (along with a friend) built the famous boats for Thor Heyerdahl. | was amazed and astonished that | was standing in their house and humbled by the greatness they had achieved. Many people today will not be aware of Heyerdahl's expeditions but in the 50’s and 60’s he was the planet's most well known explorer. | had the privilege of standing beside the two men who were responsible for building the crafts, which their ancestors had created centuries ago. Heyerdahl took the Limachi brothers to Morocco, where they built the actual boats in the tradition of their ances- Picturesque Lake Titicaca, on the border of Peru and Bolivia, sits 3,812 meters above sea level. It is the highest navigable lake in the world. 32 FOCUS - JANUARY 2010