The Yavarí

Peru [1] is filled with stories about large iron boats lugged to improbable places. In 1890, rubber baron Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald and an army of 1,000 Piro Indians lugged an entire steamship up and over a ridge, nearly 10 kilometers, to connect two river basins. This harebrained scheme became the subject of Fitzcarraldo, the 1982 movie directed by Werner Herzog.

An even crazier but less well-known scheme was concocted by the Peruvian navy in 1861, when it ordered not one but two huge iron gunboats—the Yavarí and the Yapuro—for patrolling the waters of Lake Titicaca [2]. Within two years, the Thames Iron Works and Ship Building in London had the gunboats shipped, in crates, around Cape Horn to Arica, the Peruvian port that would later be snatched by Chile in the War of the Pacific.

This is where the story becomes surreal. From the desert coast, with the Andes looming before them, porters hefted the crankshafts to their shoulders, while mules stood, knees quivering, under the weight of hull sections and crates containing more than 2,766 ship parts. The 466-kilometer journey, up and over the Andes, wound up steep and treacherous trails and included a final 4,700-meter pass. Not surprisingly, getting everything to the shores of Lake Titicaca took more than six years. With much fanfare, the Yavarí was launched on Christmas Day 1870 and the Yapura three years after.

Because of a lack of coal, the navy began shoveling a more abundant local fuel source into the ship’s boilers: dried llama dung. But more space was needed to accommodate the manure piles. The Yavarí was cut in half in order to add 12 meters to her hold, bringing her to a total length of 50 meters. Finally, in 1914, her steam engine was replaced by a Swedish-made Bolinder, a four-cylinder diesel. Half a century later, the boats were decommissioned. The Yapura was sold for scrap metal, and the Yavarí was abandoned on the lake’s shores, its instruments carted off to Arequipa [3]’s municipal museum.

The sight of the forgotten ship, whose hull had rusted little in the lake’s fresh waters, moved Englishwoman Meriel Larken to action in the early 1980s. She launched the Yavarí Association to save the old ship and attracted the financial support of Britain’s Prince Philip, who had visited Lake Titicaca in 1962. In 1999, more than 40 years after her last voyage, the Yavarí once again slipped her moors and began plying the waters of Lake Titicaca [2].

The Yavarí is, without a doubt, the most interesting thing to see in Puno [4], and one-of-a-kind in the whole world. The bunk, engine, and map rooms have been meticulously restored, and the bridge has all the ship’s original navigation equipment, including an old-fashioned sextant and compass. The Bolinder engine, lovingly restored by Volvo engineers, is considered the oldest working ship engine in the world. When the association has more funds, it plans to build 10 cabins and offer what will surely be unforgettable overnight lake cruises—hopefully in 2011, when the Yavarí turns 150 years old.