the pre-Inca Tiwanaku city
We just ended staying in La Paz for a couple of days.
Except for the fact that this 2-million people city is strangly built on the slopes of the mountains (it is very tiring to walk in the streets here) and that there are very nice museums and traditional markets here, not much positive can be said about it. It is basically a city unlike any other Bolivian city we have been: it is very dirty and chaotic here, there are no trees and flowers here and the old colonial buildings all seem to be sort of collapsing….
But yesterday evertything was different. We went on a day excursion 65 km from here, to the ruïns of the Tiwanaku city. It used to be the capital of a very important ancient culture.
The ruïns of Tiwanaku are located near the famous lake Titicaca which is the highest lake in the world. Tiwanaku is near lake Titicaca because the lake once functioned as the river Nile of this continent, regulating the climate of the nearby ´altiplato´ flat lands located high in between the Andes mountains. As the Tiwanaku people were also very inventive in the way how they farmed those lands (using ricefield-like configurations) it was possible to produce lots of the food, so much that Tiwanaku could become a very big city.
In the end this resulted in Tiwanaku becoming one of the most important South-American empires, compairable to the more famous Inka´s. Tiwanaku built big cities like the Inca´s: using unknwown ways to move, cut and combine large stones into big buildings and they also knew as much about astronomy as the later Inka´s did. In contrast with the Inka´s however (who lasted less than 300 years), the Tiwanaku empire existed for more than 3000 years. But around 144o it suddenly dissapeared (they don´t know why), more than 500 years before the Inca-empire appeared.
At the site of the Tiwanaku capital only 40 % of the stones are left, since a lot of them were stolen by the Spanish to build churches. But what remains of this ancient city is still fascinating: some very large and impressive Inca-like statues, a very large piramide (they are now reconstructing it), a big religious temple and an underground cellar in which they have put more than 200 stone faces in its walls. There also is a big harbour, built when lake Titica used to be a much bigger lake. This harbour is constructed by strangely shaped massive 150.000 kg stones, nobody knows how these stones have been moved to that place.
What interested us the most was a very large stone gate in which the Tiwanaku´s had inscripted a very accurate calendar. The calender has 12 months, with each month having 30 days, so they really understood the monthly & yearly cycles of the earth. But they were 5 days short, so they gave the month September 35 days, because it was the most important month of the year (spring starts in September over here).
Tiwanaku is probably not so well-known in Europe as the Tiwanaku culture has no written history, and it was already gone before the Spanish arrived here. But these ruïns are not to be missed when you are around here.
This morning we took a 50-minutes flight, landing on a little grass airfield in the jungle in Rurrenabaque, in the Bolivian amazone. So we are now out of La Paz and in a very different setting. It´s very warm, there are lots of trees, plants and animals, and it´s very humid.
A very nice change of environment…
Jannis.
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