Visiting Tiwanaku

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Yesterday we visited Tiwanaku, an important pre-Inca settlement, some 50km or so out of La Paz, up on the High Plateau. We left after a breakfast consisting of mate de coca (which is delicious!) and a small, buffet breakfast. Climbed up to El Alto at 4050m. We had stunning views of La Paz on the way up.

Going through El Alto was fascinating as it was Market Day, so the place was absolutely crammed and packed of local flavour. We didn´t stop but our heads swivelled and eyes were spinning to catch everything. The bus then drove along the High Plateau, a valley, some 4060m above sea level. The place consists of farming communities as the Plateau is pretty fertile land. This time of year, the farmers are praying for rain as the soil is too hard for planting. After an hour or so driving with stunning mountains in the background, we reached the highest point of the Plateau at 4062m. Stopped for photos and to admire the gorgeous scenery. At the viewpoint, there were burnt ashes and reamins of fires. Our guide explained that this was a sacred site where people would make supplications to Mother Earth. Fires were lit and various items would be thrown on for the Gods above.

A few kilometres from here was our eventual destination - Tiwanaku. It used to be an important religious site with up to 20,000 inhabitants. Because the site pre-dates the Egyptian pyramids, no-one is sure exactly what it was used for but certainly seems to have had soltise(sp?) reasons as most of the important parts were designed to allow the sun rays through during the soltise twice yearly. There was the remains of an ancient pyramid and various temple-like buildings. Unfortunately, the Spanish disapproved of such a place and did their best to destroy it, so there is not a huge amount left to see, but there is an excellent museum on site and our guide was very good at explaining what we were looking at.

Part of the Temple floor and wall was very well preserved, so gave a very good idea of what the place had looked like complete, the wall had a releif of various faces in 3D, and some were quite creepy with griçmaces and strange-looking headgear but others looked very cheerful! There was also a big statut of a priest - we know he was a priest because of the head band and the symbols carved on the stone.

One fascinating fact about the site was the real mixture of stone - some were made of local stone while others were constructed out of basalt, a much harder stone and nowhere near the site! The nearest pñlace the stones could have come frome were a good 60 plus kilometres away. No one knows how or why the basalt were transported to Tiwanaku.

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