Puno to La Paz

Returning from home stay, we hired a private bus to see some of the sight s en route to La Paz. The public transport links to & across the Peruvian – Bolivian border take all day, so shelled out some cash & broke up the day long travel with a few stops at local tourist attractions.

Before we crossed the border we stopped at the small village of Chucuito to see the Templo de la Fertilidad with its interesting collection of phalluses. I thought of how the place would have made Seth & Norty’s trip so posed for a suitable photo!!!

Peru & Bolivia, politically don’t get on, the border crossing was therefore formal & without smiles. We passed through without hitch though & passed on into Bolivia to our first to stop: Tiwaniku, a pre Incan civilisation that lived on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca. Little is know about them & disappeared, without explanation before the Inca appeared so most knowledge is hypothesis & guess work.

Like the Inca, the people that built Tiwaniku were worshipers of the sun. They erected several huge megaliths as shown below. Each was carved with hieroglyphics representing pairs, such as land & water or male & female. The final picture is of the sun stone, whose carvings depict symbols of each month, 365 days & 24 hours. Given that the carvings date from 600BC, it’s a little daunting to think of us as an advanced today, when we only (re-)invented the modern calendar a few hundred years ago!

We carried on into Bolivia & reached La Paz just before sunset. We stopped briefly to pose for a photo, & as the temperature was falling so quickly neither Sean, Tim nor myself were all to keen to hang around outside & instead opted to join everyone for a final night few beers at the traditional La Paz night out “The La Paz Hard Rock Café”… of course !!!! (NOT)