Tiwanaku ruins

For a nice, relaxed day of Sunday ruins, today Chris, Pascale and myself went and visited the ruins of Tiwanaku, which are just an hour's bus ride out of La Paz. Tiwanaku is the home of the Tiwanaku culture, an ancient people that built themselves an empire upon the altiplano of Bolivia, long before Inca times, and that were most likely the ancestors of many modern-day Aymara-speaking Bolivians.

Entrance sign for Tiwanaku.

There are numerous travel agencies in La Paz that can organise day tours to Tiwanaku for you; but we chose to take the cheaper and more relaxed option, and to just hop on a local combi, and to explore the place ourselves. When we got to Tiwanaku, we were — surprise, surprise! — hounded by people offering to guide us; and in the end, we agreed to take a two-hour tour of the museum and the ruins from a local guide.

The guide was actually very good, and definitely worth getting: he explained heaps of stuff inside the museum (where we weren't allowed to take photos, sadly); and he showed us all the good bits out on the ruins themselves as well. I was a bit worried at first, because he was kind of whining about how much we'd bargained him down (from Bs. 50 to Bs. 30); but he turned out to be fine with it in the end, and to give us great explanations of everything (in Spanish — not too many English-speaking guides here in Bolivia, it seems) from beginning to end.

The main feature of Tiwanaku is a big pyramid, which was (just like all the Inca stuff) built precisely to face a certain direction, so that the sun would shine straight through it at a perfect angle, during the summer and winter solstices. Most of the pyramid has been destroyed, but the lower layers of it are still pretty much intact.

Lower layers of the pyramid at Tiwanaku.

We climbed up to the top of the pyramid, where you can get a great view of the whole site, and all its temples and obelisks. There are a number of ruined buildings on the top of the pyramid: they look like little houses, but apparently nobody ever lived in them; according to our guide, their purpose was to serve as "resting-houses" during the afternoon, but the people returned to their homes away from the pyramid at night-time.

Resting-houses atop the pyramid.

The temple of the underworld would have to be the coolest — and freakiest! — part of the ruins at Tiwanaku. The whole temple is built into the ground, with its base being about 2 metres below the level of the ground around it. The the four walls that comprise the temple are completely filled with stone heads, each of which protrudes out a bit and stares back at you. Apparently, important people had their head carved into the walls here when they died, and their bodies were then put into the wall behind the carving.

Heads. Lots of heads.

This poor fella must have copped a lot of jokes, back in the day.

Tiwanaku is also very famous for the "gate of the sun", a door just above the temple of the underworld. On the summer and winter solstices, the sun shines through this door at a perfect angle, creating a breathtaking silhouette effect. Even on other days of the year, it looks quite cool.

Gate of the sun.

To tell the truth, I'd never heard of Tiwanaku before (didn't bother looking up Bolivian ruins in my Lonely Planet — Peru had more than enough), and I wasn't expecting much from it. But it's a very beautiful and a very interesting place. Both the ruins and the museums are a must-see. And also very different to all the Inca ruins that I saw in Peru — the surrounding landscape (flat and dry, instead of mountainous and lush), as well as the ruins themselves (different architecture, different religious symbolism behind it).