Ramis

I’ll be honest: we ended up in Ramis for a fairly unglamorous reason — we were driving the northern route around the lake from Juliaca toward Huancané and needed lunch, and the town happened to be there. It’s not on anyone’s Titicaca itinerary, and after a day there I understood why and also felt a little sorry for that fact, because it’s a real, working place in a way that a lot of the more photogenic lake towns aren’t anymore.

Ramis sits where the Ramis River, which drains a huge chunk of the Peruvian altiplano, finally empties into the northern reaches of the lake. The town itself is unassuming — dusty streets, brick and adobe buildings, a market that smelled of fried fish and diesel in about equal measure — but the river mouth itself, a sprawl of reed beds and channels opening into the lake, is genuinely striking once you get down to the water. It’s also, I later learned, a site of small-scale and sometimes contentious gold mining upriver, which explains a tension I half-sensed but couldn’t place at the time; the river’s ecology has taken a beating from it over the years.

We walked down to where fishermen were unloading small boats, hauling in what looked like carachi and pejerrey, and one guy let us watch him mend a net for a few minutes without asking for anything in return, which felt like a small kindness in a place that clearly doesn’t see many outsiders stopping to look. Lia struck up a conversation with a woman selling boiled potatoes and cheese from a cart, and we ended up eating lunch standing right there on the riverbank rather than at any restaurant, which honestly might have been the best meal of that whole stretch of the trip.

I won’t oversell Ramis — there’s no lodge, no curated experience, nothing built for visitors at all. But if you’re the kind of traveler who likes seeing a place before anyone’s decided to package it, and you’re already driving this stretch of shoreline, it’s worth the twenty-minute detour down to the water. It reminded me that Titicaca is a working lake for a lot more people than the ones who show up in postcards.

When to go: The dry season, May to September, keeps the access roads passable and the river mouth calmer; this isn’t a place to plan around weather so much as around already being nearby.