Let's be honest: La Paz is a difficult city. It's so high up that you have to be careful not to exert yourself too much, yet every street besides the main one is on a steep incline. The poverty is overwhelming. It was (for me) a very unintelligible place. I wasn't sad to move on. (Neither was Kaitlin.)
So, with the help of our faithful and newly hired guide Alejandro, we departed the city of La Paz early on the morning of the 17th for the ruins of the ancient city of Tiwanaku, located about an hour to the west of La Paz by vehicle. We walked around there for a couple hours, and it was amazing, although it doesn't compare to the archeological sites of Peru. The problem is that the Tiwanaku buildings were looted by the Incas, who conquered them around the 1100s or so. But it was cool to see how the Tiwanakus set the stage for later Inca innovations, in terms of irrigation, astronomy, building technologies and the arts. Here we are at the largest-surviving monument within the city of Tiwanaku: the door of the sun. On the winter solstice, the sun rises directly over this.
We spent that night in Copacabana, on the shores of Lake Titicaca. This is the sunset that night:
The next day, we sailed to the Sun Island, where supposedly the Sun God Inti Raimi comes from. There were some amazing Inca ruins:
And then we left Bolivia, and crossed into Peru:
We have been in Cusco now for a couple of days, but that's another whole blog entry. So stay tuned...
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