{"id":3428,"date":"2016-06-06T19:11:01","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T19:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/?p=3428"},"modified":"2016-06-06T19:11:01","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T19:11:01","slug":"tiwanaku-mystery-and-destruction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/2016\/06\/06\/tiwanaku-mystery-and-destruction\/","title":{"rendered":"Tiwanaku – Mystery and Destruction"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Temple<\/a>
Temple Statue<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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’ll ever have because of the condition of the ruins.\u00a0 This site could have been as impressive as Machu Picchu had it been taken care of and preserved over time, but lack of care and serious excavation has left it in a state that leaves you wanting to see more.\u00a0 Unfortunately, many of the stones that originally made up Tiwanaku are now used in the walls of the homes in the surrounding villages.\u00a0 It has also suffered from a lack of preservation by the Bolivian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’t seem to have the same sense of history, despite the fact that it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.<\/p>\n

\"Entrance<\/a>
Entrance to the Akapana Pyramid<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Temple<\/a>
Temple Wall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Temple<\/a>
Temple Stairs<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"One<\/a>
One of the Statues<\/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’t 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.<\/p>\n

\"Close-Up<\/a>
Close-Up of the Temple Door<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Gate<\/a>
Gate of the Sun<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Ruins\"<\/a>
Ruins<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Dona<\/a>
Dona in the Ruins<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the greatest questions about the buildings, which pre-date Machu Picchu, 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.<\/p>\n

\"Solid<\/a>
Solid Wall with Figures<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Akapana<\/a>
Akapana from the Distance<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Another<\/a>
Another Statue<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Water<\/a>
Water Aqueducts Created Their Prosperity<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The fact that some people believe in the myth was not lost on our guide.\u00a0 Inside one of the temples, all along the walls were stone carvings of faces.\u00a0 Ricky told us that ancient people of Tiwanaku would carve the faces of the important people who helped build the empire, perhaps the same way that the early Presidents of the United States were immortalized at Mount Rushmore.\u00a0 Then he pointed to a face that didn’t look much like the other faces and intimated that they even included the face of an alien being.\u00a0 Ricky’s smile let us know that it was just his usual joke to play with any na\u00efve tourists.<\/p>\n

\"Supposed<\/a>
Supposed Alien Face<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Our<\/a>
Our Guide Got Us to Have Fun at the Gate of the Sun<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Very<\/a>
Very Worn Statue<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Statue<\/a>
Statue at the Center of the Akapana Pyramid<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We enjoyed seeing some of the amazing things that still remained though, including the “Gate of the Sun”, 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.<\/p>\n

\"Possible<\/a>
Possible Calendar on the Gate of the Sun<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Perhaps<\/a>
Perhaps Marking the Movement of the Sun<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Local<\/a>
Local Village with Stones from Tiwanaku<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Our<\/a>
Our Guide, Ricky, Showing Us a Water Pool<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It isn’t our intention to provide a history lesson on Tiwanaku or\u00a0any place else that we visit, we just want to describe what it was like to be there, tell a little about what we learned, and share our passion for seeing unique and interesting places.\u00a0 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 and eventually conquer its people,\u00a0provides a brief glimpse into where the distinct pride\u00a0displayed by every\u00a0Bolivian we met must come from.\u00a0 There once was a vast empire long before\u00a0the Inca empire that most people are aware of.\u00a0 We would see many more temples from the Inca empire during our trip, but the history of Tiwanaku made it a very special part of our trip.<\/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’ll ever have because … <\/p>\n

Continue reading Tiwanaku – Mystery and Destruction<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":89944846,"featured_media":3495,"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":[8792,30367,2290,14837,1098,678,5174,436,216055,1260516,200],"class_list":["post-3428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-south-america","tag-adventure","tag-archeology","tag-architecture","tag-bolivia","tag-culture","tag-history","tag-mythology","tag-photography","tag-ruins","tag-tiwanaku","tag-travel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/imgp8788.jpg?fit=3008%2C2000&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6pbM5-Ti","jetpack-related-posts":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3428"}],"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=3428"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3504,"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3428\/revisions\/3504"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isobaresoffit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}