Yup, it all has to end sometime. We arrived home midnight the 24th and just got our bags today. We left La Paz, Bolivia at 6am, Lima to Miami , Miami to Seattle, very long day.
We feel kind of empty after being on the go for 5 weeks but it is nice to be home.
Stay tuned for our next adventure!
This is the site we wanted to see the most because of the precision of the rock work cuts and the buildings. This is different than anything that we have seen so far and the fact is it predates the Inka by some 200-500 years. The local guide said they believe it was the Tiwanaka but they are just guessing because they seemed to have dispersed around 1500 AD and while they believe they dispersed there really is no concrete proof of that either, just some similar pottery found in the Amazon region of Bolivia. Fact is they built a Temple that is beyond explanation and my argument is that everyone, including the locals, want to explain this based on our own paradigms but the reality is that most theories have a high probability of not being true.
We have taken many photos some of which I will share in this blog but the majority I will share later, the ones I have chosen are to simply challenge your curiosity. Let me start by showing you the sunken Temple, it has 175 different faces built into the walls and faces that appear to be people that they have visited or people that had visited them. Archeologists agree that these are different faces representing guest or visits and when standing in a certain marked spot, (by a different foreign rock introduced into the wall), the Temple sees the Southern Cross perfectly..hmmm.
So here we go with some photos to get you going:
The Island of the Sun was our destination today, unfortunately it was just the three of us plus two guides as one of our group, Helen, is really suffering from altitude sickness. The doctor here said to get back to Lima, (sea level) as soon as possible but that is difficult to arrange at this time. Her husband John came with us and he isn’t doing all that well either mostly trying to deal with the shortness of breath.
We took a boat to the north end of the island and disembarked at a small village where we visited a very rough museum with some of the artifacts of the pre-Inka period and pictures of Jacque Cousteau when he visited the lake for a exploration of the deepest parts, searching for the giant frog. From there we took an Inka trail to the top, or almost to the top, where they had a temple to worship the sun and the earth. There is a huge rock that resembles a Puma, a sacred animal representing their life on earth. It was a wonderful walk and the scenery was splendid. I will admit that at this stage we getting a little “templed out” if you know what I mean. I am not saying that it wasn’t worth it, quite the opposite, but we have been hearing a different version of the same Inka story for 3 weeks now. Still interesting because this comes from another tribe called the Ayamara who are indigenous in this region.
Jacque Cousteau came here in 1970’s to search for this giant frog that lives in Lake Titicaca. It is 55 cm long , can survive at 90 m below the surface and never needs to come up for air. We saw some picture and the local guide told us that there is a farm locally that is raising them and putting them back into the lake. So for a few bolivianos we could visit the farm and see them first hand, no surprise Berniece wasn’t interested nor John but I thought, what the hell, I am here and why not go see them. Well that was a waste of time, or at least the frogs were, the trip to see them was a real adventure. We went down a dirt road through a farm, then walked to the lake were a local pulled a wooden boat, which could have used a little bailing, close to a slab walk ramp about 12 inches wide and 6 ft out into the water, (good balancing practice), which we boarded, (or fell into whichever you prefer), and then he rowed out to a raft that was equally unstable to show us this little frog which he claims was an immature one. It was a bust but the frog is quite interesting if you look at it closely; well ok, it is just a frog but it was fun.
Just arrived but unbeknown to us we had to get a five year visa to enter the country and pay $270.00 US dollars, (and not just any dollar but dollars that were in perfect condition). The process was painless and now were in our final country of this very long holiday. Four more days and it is homeward bound, not that we are counting but the truth is 5 weeks is a long time.
No picture for now but looking forward to our discovery of this country .
Puno, let me assure any skeptics that altitude does make a serious difference! We are just fine but I can tell you honestly that the effects are very noticeable..no running up the stairs that is for sure.
We woke up to a gorgeous sunny day with very few clouds in the sky, something that is very unusual this time of year because it is the rainy season, the locals found it too hot but we didn’t of course. Our tour this morning was the floating islands. A tribe called the Uros have found a way to form Islands, and I mean real islands, by tying together reed roots that have floated up after breaking way from the bottom of the lake . After they tie the roots together they criss cross the top with many layers of reeds which form the base on which they build their structures. Everything is done with the reeds that grow in the shallow area of Lake Titicaca. If they chose to build another island for a newly married couple they just repeat the process, although it takes a year. Now to make sure that the roots don’t get to close to the bottom, less than 10 feet, and reattach themselves they have a hole in the middle of the island so they measure the depth of the water; if it get too shallow they cut the anchors and paddle to a deeper spot.
They do have grade schools on a common Island and we had the good fortune to visit one. It was built and operated by the Seven Day Adventists. The children sang to us in English, Spanish, Japanese, and their local language , (the name escapes me).
In the afternoon we visited another archeological site, and accent burial site of the Cholla, around 200BC, and later the Inkas. Another demonstration of rock structure that seem to defy logic.
We are here for tonight and tomorrow we leave Peru and go to Bolivia.
From Cusco to Puno is a wonderful ride on the “Andean Explorer”. It travels through the Andes then onto the Altiplano, the highest plateau in Peru, and ends at Lake Titicaca in the lakeside community of Puno. The trip takes a full day, 10 hours, so we get to Puno at 6:00 and got settled into our hotel at 7:00 before a slow walk around the main street area. Puno is the ultimate test for altitude sickness as it is 12, 500 ASL. We have been taking the pills, (half the dose recommended), for two days and probably will stop tomorrow as it is all downhill from here, (La Pas is 600 ft lower), but it all depends, no sense trying to be a hero and wreck what is left of our vacation. Altitude sickness, once it sets in, can be very bothersome.
So tomorrow we got to the floating Islands of Lake Titicaca…should be very interesting!
This is our last day in Cusco and for some the last day in South America so for today it was a glorified shopping trip to Pisac, a small community in the Inka Sacred Valley. The trip was about an hour and along the way we stopped to view the Peruvian Andes for the last time. The valley’s are very pastoral and the communities are almost ran like a co-op, people working and sharing their resources from farm equipment to the actual crop. We stopped at a Llama and Alpaca farm where the local villages co-op their finished products . We made a purchase of a few things and, interestingly, it had to be paid in two bills because the money was for two separate communities. Very cool!
Pisac has a very large market every Sunday where the indigenous people from the surrounding mountain communities come to buy and to sell. They are in their native dress, so you see real people as they are with or without the tourists.
The natives, and descendant of the Inka, are very small people, (which just adds to the mystery of how they could move the big rocks), and very colorful. Today, without it being planned by our guide, was a celebration that involved all the local communities and we were fortunate to witness a day of parades and festivities in the town square. I hope you enjoy the photos!
After the temple we went to Saqsaywaman site to view a temple dedicated to the lighting god, note the zigzag walls. They put 100 metric ton rocks in this wall; how did they move these..?
You just have to wonder but I think I figured it out, sorry can’t tell you right now.
The highest city in our travels so far as I mentioned earlier but so far…touch wood…we are not feeling anything that could be described as “altitude sickness”.
Today we started our tour with the obligatory church trip, ok it wasn’t that bad but still if you have seen one you …you know the rest! Ok. This one was different because it was an Inca temple site converted to a Catholic church. The Inca workmanship was outstanding given the year this was built, around the 13th century. Our next stop was the Inca burial grounds in a cave. The Incas mummified the royalty , the Inca, (while the entire group is called Incas in fact the word Inca refers only to the “king”), and his entourage., the rest of the people were buried in a grave.
The temples we have been seeing throughout this trip were all to worship the sun, stars and the earth. The Inka (the native spelling ) believed in three worlds. The sky represented by the Condor, the earth represented by the Puma, and the underworld represented by the Snake. All are very important in their beliefs, mother earth was honored to gain favor for good crops etc so their practices could be characterized as being that of the first real environmentalists. The Inka also had figured out long before Europe that the earth was round. (The Europeans were stuck in mythology not only with their religions but the world as it was, hence the flat earth belief and of course at that time if you disbelieved that notion the church would punish you as history has shown. It could be argued that the church was a major contributor to ignorance at that time). But the Inka, believing in the sun, earth, and underworld, looked at their environment logically. So logically if the sun and the moon were round then it made sense that the world they lived on was round too! Pretty simple.
The temples were laid out in a fashion as to highlight the summer and winter solstice, the fall and spring equinox, so windows were fashioned so that the sun would shine on certain artifacts at that exact time. Therefore they knew exactly what time of the year they were entering or in at all times. Simple but very effective for their livelihood. Here is some of their workmanship but it is not in any particular order:
What can be said that hasn’t already been said about this archeological site? Probably nothing but just standing and looking at this ancient city, (that they believe is only 60% revealed), poses the question: why has the world lost the technology to achieve such a engineering feat with only the most rudimentary tools? Indeed it is lost at least in my opinion because moving the stones is one thing; shaping them to fit so perfectly is yet another.
However our guide, and some, but few, others, feels that the Incas did not build this entire village but conquered the inhabitants and added on to it. While most people do not necessarily support that idea, there appears to be evidence that could support a great argument as the architecture seems to be of two different time periods or maybe not all Incas. I will try to illustrate that in the photos but it is something that can only be appreciated first hand.
