West Ham's llamas and Lake Titicaca

Interesting snippet in the Times' Diary by Matthew Parris on Wednesday. On Lake Titicaca (no relation to Titi Camara) in Peru there's a steamboat, the Yavari, built by Thames Ironworks in 1862. The boat was transported in small packages to a railhead in the Atacama desert, then carried by llamas (not presumably Bernard Lama) to the 12,000-feet high Lake Titicaca, the world's highest navigable lake, where it was reassembled. The Yavari was rotting away on Lake Titicaca, but was saved by Englishwoman Meriel Larkin. Now she's teamed up with West Ham's outreach team to send a group of West Ham youngsters to Peru to retrace that llama trip from Atacama to Lake Titicaca, where the Yavari is now a floating B&B (click on link for details). So that's where we sent young Freddie Sears…