{"id":37606,"date":"2019-01-22T14:11:24","date_gmt":"2019-01-22T21:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/?p=37606"},"modified":"2019-01-22T14:11:24","modified_gmt":"2019-01-22T21:11:24","slug":"mysterious-tiwanaku-in-bolivia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/2019\/01\/22\/mysterious-tiwanaku-in-bolivia\/","title":{"rendered":"Mysterious Tiwanaku in Bolivia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walking through the ruins of Tiwanaku brings both a sense of fascination and yearning for more. This once great capital fills you with a sense of mystery, both because of the seemingly impossible building methods used by the inhabitants over two-thousand years ago as well as the lack of knowledge that we\u2019ll ever have because of the condition of the ruins.\u00a0 Unfortunately, many of the stones that originally made up Tiwanaku are now used in the walls of the homes in the surrounding villages.\u00a0 It has also suffered from a lack of preservation by the Bolivian government, which doesn\u2019t seem to have the same sense of history, despite the fact that it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Walls of Tiwanaku<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Temple Statue<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Entrance to the Sun Temple with the Statue in the Center<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As with pretty much everything that we visited while in Bolivia, when we walked through the ruins of Tiwanaku, we were virtually by ourselves.\u00a0 Other than the small market outside of the site, hoping to sell trinkets to whatever tourists made their way to visit this important piece of history, we walked the trails along the walls of the ancient city alone.\u00a0 Our guide, Ricky, told us of the history of Tiwanaku, which dates back to about 200 B.C. or possibly even earlier.\u00a0 Most of the remaining ruins are those of the three temples that celebrated the three worlds revered by the inhabitants of Tiwanaku, Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t the Heaven and Hell of the Judeo-Christian beliefs, but simply the belief that there were three different worlds that their gods inhabited.\u00a0 Our understanding is that the pre-Incan people that inhabited Tiwanaku believed that all life on earth came from the depths of Lake Titicaca, which was much larger back when Tiwanaku was a bustling metropolis and its shores probably extended to the site of the ruins.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Gate of the Sun<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Temple Stairs<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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One of the Statues<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the greatest questions about the building was the skill in which the\u00a0stones of the walls were carved to fit\u00a0perfectly, without any gaps and without any kind of mortar.\u00a0 Scientists have tried to\u00a0recreate\u00a0building the walls\u00a0without the use of modern equipment and have\u00a0not been able to replicate the work done by those ancient people so long ago.\u00a0 And, as with other ancient sites such as the pyramids of Egypt, large stones were quarried miles away and somehow carried to\u00a0build these temples, a feat that\u00a0is seemingly impossible.\u00a0 That has led some people\u00a0to speculate that perhaps the ancient people of Tiwanaku had help from some sort of extra-terrestrial beings, but it is far more likely that they just had skills and techniques that have been lost over time.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Possible Calendar on the Gate of the Sun<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Solid Wall with Figures<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Entrance to the Akapana Pyramid<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We enjoyed seeing some of the amazing things that still remained though, including the \u201cGate of the Sun\u201d, which we were told contained an ancient calendar.\u00a0 One could easily imagine the ancestors of the Amarya people using the different stone structures as a\u00a0celestial calendar to determine the seasons.\u00a0 The site itself is very\u00a0vast and there apparently has\u00a0been some recent attempts to use ground penetrating radar to determine if there are more ruins to be found in the surrounding\u00a0area, perhaps buried just below the surface.\u00a0\u00a0As we stood at the site where the priests would recite prayers and give speeches to the people, Ricky explained that there were other\u00a0stone platforms every few hundred yards where lower priests would repeat the words of the head priest so that all of the people in the large city could hear what was being said.\u00a0 It\u00a0takes a little imagination, standing there pretty much alone in these ruins, to\u00a0envision it filled with thousands of ancient people.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Supposed Alien Face in Tiwanaku<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Akapana from the Distance<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Very Worn Statue<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tiwanaku, despite its condition,\u00a0was\u00a0still definitely awe inspiring.\u00a0 Walking amongst temples that were built\u00a0in South America long before\u00a0Europeans would make their way to the shores of these lands provides a brief glimpse into the pride\u00a0displayed by every\u00a0Bolivian that we met.\u00a0 There was such a vast civilization with cities and buildings that have withstood the ravages of time that is truly fascinating to see.\u00a0 If you visit La Paz, Bolivia, taking time to go to Tiwanaku is certainly worth taking the time to visit.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walking through the ruins of Tiwanaku brings both a sense of fascination and yearning for more. This once great capital fills you with a sense of mystery, both because of the seemingly impossible building methods used by the inhabitants over two-thousand years ago as well as the lack of knowledge that we\u2019ll ever have because … <\/p>\n

Continue reading Mysterious Tiwanaku in Bolivia<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":89944846,"featured_media":3493,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4331],"tags":[8792,30367,2290,87918,678,436,216055,41012,200,13181],"class_list":["post-37606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-south-america","tag-adventure","tag-archeology","tag-architecture","tag-explore","tag-history","tag-photography","tag-ruins","tag-temple","tag-travel","tag-wanderlust"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/imgp8785.jpg?fit=3008%2C2000&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6pbM5-9My","jetpack-related-posts":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37606"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/89944846"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37606"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37613,"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37606\/revisions\/37613"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}