nothing patchy bout this mamma

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Rich again, with officially the worst named entry ever!

this time we managed to visit a site that wasnt a cemetary. although there were still a fair amount of mummies knocking around and skulls with big holes in them. Fantastic.

Tiwanaku is the capital of a very old, very advanced (in some ways more so than the Inca themselves), pre Inca civilisation. The site is ENORMOUS but a serious lack of funds has limited the scope for excavation. What is visible is a HUGE seven step pyramid, that mostly looks like a normal hill but the excavations have reveled alot of cool stuff. There is also a subteranean chapel type thingy, to represent the underworld of the ancestors (probably), a ground level one to represent the current world and one on top of the pyramid for worshipping the celestial stuff. The compound includes the apparently quite famous Sun Gate, which is very cool.

Its surprising how little is known of this important civilisation, and particularly how they managed to thrive where they did, 13,000 feet above sea level in roughly A.D. 500-950. This has led to various unlikely alien theories, and one particularly splendid one from Austrian astronomer H.S. Bellamy that claims the whole town was shifted upwards massively when one of the earths (presumably numerous) moons came crashing down to earth a few centuries ago. Once again, the stupidity of people is quite astounding.

what is really interesting is that the stone is not local. The nearest possible source of any of the stone (and one that doesnt seem to have been quarried) is ten kilometres away. That doesnt sound too far till you think about the logistics of moving some REALLY BIG ROCKS, one of which weighs over 130 tons, to the site. Some of the smaller (at a mere forty tons) green rocks must have gone over 90 kilometres. keep in mind there is no water system to sail them down as people think may have happened for stone henge, and the site is uphill from everywhere and nobody had thought to invent the wheel. hmmm. when you also consider that nothing in stone henge weighs more than 50 tons it gets quite perplexing. But i doubt that aliens flew them in, thats just silly.

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Photos

pachamama
mother earth in statue form.

subteranean temple
lots of wierd faces in the wall

sun gate
complete with Jen, poorly framed, in the background. the camera was in danger of dieing

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the entrance to the main temple complex. Nearby is a cleverly shaped whole through the wall that amplifies sound, but noone really knows what it was for

Big stone
the quality of these peoples stone work is incredible. Despite being open to the weather for a thousand odd years, the detail is incredibly crisp