La Paz, Tiahuanico and Valle De La Luna

Trip Start Jan 26, 2000
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Trip End Jun 14, 2000


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Flag of Bolivia  ,
Thursday, April 27, 2000

Next day it was back to the dull, bleak city of La Paz where we spent a couple of days relaxing. Despite it's ugliness and smog I grew to rather like La Paz, lying in a bowl shape valley with the huge snow capped peak of Cerro Illimani (6402m) and it's imposing presence close by. It was an excellent place to wander the streets, market places and watch the Bolivians going about their everyday business. It was in La Paz we said good bye to Louise and put her on the bus back to Sucre where she was staying with friends, despite all the abuse I give her, we had a fun time and enjoyed her company for that week.
I did a couple of side trips from La Paz. Firstly I went to Valle De La Luna, this was the second valley of the moon I'd been to, the other was in San Pedro, Chile. The valley, which was actually not a valley but a hillside consisted of lots of eroded pinnacle formations surrounded by small canyons. I was informed that the technical term for this type of formations was badlands. After spending some time exploring the area, I took a five minute walk down the road to a zoo. I'm not a big fan of zoos, but my reason for going was to see the condors. I really wanted to see one of these huge birds close up. As they hopped around their large enclosure I could see with all it's wrinkles and strangely formed head that it really was as ugly as it appeared on all the pictures I'd seen.
My other trip from La Paz was to the ruined city of Tiahuanico, home to the Tiahuanico people for 1800 years, 500b.c. to 1200ad. I found these ruins interesting so I'm going to bore you with some of the details of the civilization.
The Tiahuanico-Huari culture was the second of the great Andean cultures, the first being the Chavins (I don't know too much about them) and the third, the Incas (which I'm sure everybody heard of). Many people actually believe the Incas actually evolved from Tiahuanico descendants. The Tiahuanico people like the Egyptians build some huge structures and in many ways they were more advanced than the Egyptians. Some of their buildings necessitated the transportation of slabs of rock 55,000kg, 30 miles across Lake Titicaca and also sandstone blocks weighing in at 180,000kg from a quarry 10 miles away. At it's height it had 20,000 inhabitants and the people built a sophisticated system of roads, canals and agricultural terracing. One of the main theories why the city was deserted is that the water level of Lake Titicaca dropped leaving it along way from it's shores.
It was in La Paz where I finally said good bye to Francois as he caught a bus back to Lima for his flight, although he made one last valiant attempt to stay by booking on a bus which was canceled, in the end we managed to put him on another one.
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