back in La Paz where the river flows red

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From the Amazon jungle, it was back to La Paz, which was feeling less crazy and more like home by now. We have both decided we love the City, and if anyone reading this is planning to go to La Paz, I have to give our hostel a big plug. It is called Arthy´s Guesthouse and is run by a local family, as opposed to a lot of hostels in Bolivia which are foreign owned. The whole family is really friendly and super helpful. The father, Ruben, has the warmest, most contagious smile you will ever see and always has a story to tell. He is an artist, a carpenter and an athlete. Now well in his late 60´s, he started running at 45, and was competing internationally by 47 and has an inspiring zest for life. He got very mad at me when he overheard me telling Jono, who was complaining about sore knees, that he must be getting old. In addition to being run by nice locals, the showers are hot, which is a big plus in Bolivia. The beds are comfy. The rooms are quite. There are no smoking communal rooms, which is also a big plus in south America.

Despite how it may be reading at the moment, we did venture out of the comfortable surrounds of the hostel a little. One of these ventures saw us taking a guided trip out to Tiahuanaco ruins, about an hour out of La Paz, which was absolutely amazing, even just fro the drive. We drove up out of La Paz through the City on top of the flat plane at the top of the canyon called El Alto. It used to be part of La Paz, but became a separate City in 1985. With a primarily indigenous Aymara population, the City is even more chaotic than La Paz, much drier and dustier and without a tourist or hostel in sight. It is visibly poorer, with most buildings either unfinished, boarded up and-or falling apart. I felt like a total voyeur, looking down from the safety of the bus on to another world. Scrap metal recyclers that looked like forgeries from the middle ages. Where, in La Paz, every second shop is devoted to tourism, whether it is a tour agency, a cafe or a hostel, here, every second shop was devoted to recycling or repairing and every other shop in between was abandoned. People were living out of half finished home made mud brick houses with piecemeal tin roofs pegged down by piles of bricks ontop. Those less fortunate lived out of tents in abandoned petrol stations or on dirt blocks. Perhaps with a lama or two tethered outside, or some chooks in a makeshift pen, cooking over campfires, showering out of buckets. everywhere I looked, there was strange stuff going on. People with rolled up pants stomping on what looked to be potatoes on one corner. On another, about 50 decorated sheep were layed down and tethered together in a circle in the middle of the road. A sacrificial offering, perhaps? It was also interesting to learn that Lake Titicaca once covered a lot of this plane.

Once we got to Tiahuanaco, I felt like I had already had a tour of how the indigenous people and campasinos (poor farmers) live, and the tour of the ruins was a second tour, but I learnt a lot more on this one. The ruins are from a pre Inca ceremonial site, constructed over 1000 years ago but little is known about the people because they faded into obscurity, becoming one of many lost civilisations. They have worked out that the civilization faced growing social and economic problems before splintering and moving to different areas. Some of the Tiahuanaco may have became incorporated into the Inca civilisation, as there was a lot of cross over between the two civilisations. Some of the more interesting things I learnt were that the Tiahuanaco originally only ever sacrificed plants as offerings to their gods (mainly the sun), but as they faced increasing problems they started sacrificing animals and eventually people. Desperate measures for desperate times. They called themselves the sons of the sun, which is where they believed they came from and their temples were all open so they could properly worship the sun. To survive, they grew potatoes, corn and Quinoa and farmed animals. There were some social aspects to their society that I found really interesting too. Apparently each family was only allowed to have five children, after which the women drank a special nettle tea which formed as a type of birth control. Also, social status was not inherited but earned from a very young age by being clever. Children that learnt to walk and talk quickly had the opportunity to have their skulls deformed by getting them wrapped in tight bandages. This process elongated the skull, giving them a physically identifiable social status, and, it was thought, supplied more space for the brain to grow. Fascinating.

On the way back to La Paz, we saw the main river which flows through the City (and into the River Beni in the Amazon Basin) flowing, I kid you not, BRIGHT RED! We had earlier read in the Lonely Planet that it was said to be so polluted that in same places it looks bright red, and now we have seen it with our own eyes. This is worrying, considering that farmers down river use this water for irrigation and then it all ends up in the not so pristine amazon Basin... with the poor pink river dolphins. Apparently it is caused by local tanneries and paper factories along the river.

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