K+K Travels: Saturday, September 12, 2015

Kathy does not sleep well and has a bad headache. We get the hotel to bring up some oxygen but 10 minutes of that seems to make it even worse. She still feels good enough so we meet with Francisco and Alfredo at 6:30 AM and head off to Bolivia. After 2 and ½ hours we arrive at the border. We wait in line to exit Peru, walk across the bridge to Bolivia and wait even longer at immigration there. We buy our visas, get our passports stamped and after over 2 hours are ready to go. Francisco is actually just along for the ride and has just crossed the border without getting his passport stamped (he is Mexican and we are not sure of his status in Peru). Our guide Guillermo and our driver Freddy meet us at the border. Guillermo is young but enthusiastic and gives us a great background of Bolivia and the Tehuancu (it is spelled lots of different ways ) pre-Incan culture whose ruins we are going to visit. After a 30-minute ride we stop for lunch then enter the site of the ruins. Unlike Peru, which appreciates tourists and is as accommodating and professional as possible, in Bolivia the ruins are the property of the local community. We tour a small, decrepit museum housing ceramics and learn about the people. We then enter a small museum holding carved stones but find the exhibit door closed. Guillermo pulls it open and leads us into the dark room and points out some interesting points with his flashlight. A woman appears at the door and scolds Guillermo but he politely stands his ground and we continue the tour. The highlight is a 20+ foot tall statute of a man that appears to have two left hands. We then proceed to the site itself and see a largely disregarded collection of stones that could be quite impressive with a bit of work. We wander around and learn a bit about the site and a variety of speculations. No one really knows much about the Tehuancu people because their civilization ended about 1200 A.D., about 200 years before the Inca expanded their empire this far south. When the Inca arrived, the site had already been destroyed and abandoned with no trace of its inhabitants. As we tour the site, loud music is coming from the local village and we learn that it is the annual Festival de El Senor del Exhaltation (Jesus). At one end of the main temple we see through the doorway a dancing procession led by people dressed as an Inca, his queen, and others in other traditional costumes. As we leave the site the procession makes its way past us. We see a sunken temple lined with stone heads (including the famous one that always appears in the Ancient Astronaut programs.) We visit another recently discovered small site, pick up Francisco and head back to Peru. This time there are no lines at the border and we get through quickly. Two and ½ hours later we are back at the Libertador and eat dinner at the hotel. We are both pretty tired of being at altitude and look forward to getting back to sea level tomorrow.