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Click
images for an enlarged view
27th
March 1998
At Nazacara, whilst one truck went
back to collect the third boat, Oswaldo Rivera took us
to another interesting site: the remains of a five million
year-old giant armadillo, known as a Glyptodont, had been
cordoned off by locals.
That evening we became worried by the failure of
the truck to return. A Range Rover driving near the windswept
Altiplano met one of the drivers, who had walked for three
hours to bring the news that the lorry's gear box had
broken one kilometre short of its objective. Frantic satellite
phone calls followed and a Range Rover sent to La Paz
for a new gear box. Mechanical breakdowns often affect
the course of an expedition and we now found we had to
stay an extra day at Nazacara.
Next evening the new gear box arrived and the two-man
lorry team courageously drove off into the night for 35kms,
fitted the gear box and came back with the boat at midnight.
The following morning the whole fleet, flying the prestigious
flags of the Explorer's Club, the SES and Brixham Community
College set off on the next stretch of river.
On Thursday 25th May a party went to the top of a Mesa
near Calacota. A Mesa is a flat-topped tableland with
sloping sides at first and then vertical cliffs surrounding
the top of a perfect defensive site. On either side were
two bigger Mesas of the same height, 13,100ft above sea
level.
In 1997 John and Oswaldo, through
their binoculars, saw what looked like little houses
on he the next Mesa. This time they went to find out what
was really there. It was a long slog to the top and when
we got there we found the defences were as secure as they
had been when built in 1200 to 1420 AD. Where there was
a gap in the stone cliffs the people - called PAKAJES,
who dominated the Altiplano between the Tiwanaku and the
Incas, had filled it with massive stone walls built with
mortar and only five tiny entrances through some of which
you had to crawl in a mile and a half of defence works.
When we managed to get in through a hole we saw 30 or
40 "houses" rising among the natural rock outcrops on
the top. Most were almost conical - shaped like beehives,
a few were rectangular. Each had a small doorway facing
east, but no windows. A surprise awaited us - the doorways
and houses were too small for human use and each one was
full of human bones - mainly femurs, but radii, ribs,
fragments of spine as well. Oddly there were no skulls.
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