We took a taxi from our hotel to another long distance taxi company that serves between Santa Cruz and Samaipata plus side trip to El Fuerte. Like everything here, it took a bit of time to understand each other and then hard negotiations. We ended up booking the taxi exclusively for the entire trip for the day for 450B.
The road from Santa Cruz to Samaipata took close to three hours, even though it is only 120 km away. The infrastructure is quite poor and the road conditions were even worse. It has lived up to its reputation. Bolivia has only very few roads (and this includes their so called national highways) that are paved! Their mountainous terrain has made building roads a challenge and maintaining them an even bigger nightmare. Beautifully paved roads can disappear in a blink after their frequent landslides. We were rocked, bumped, zig zagged, twisted and turned to ascend to the town which is over 1600m. El Fuerte is higher at 2000m.
We visited the museum in town first to get familiar with the timeline of the site. El Fuerte was UNESCO designated in 1998. It took two hours to visit the ruin, with well laid out paths, steps and platforms to view the area sections. The ceremonial mount is most impressive and consists of a single monolithic rock 220m long and 65m wide covered with religious rock carvings. Its strategic location ensured a crossing of many cultures over the centuries: oldest is Mojocoya (400 AD), then Chané, followed by Guarani, and lastly Inca. Given the early pre-Inca construction, the artifacts were quite impressive.
The driver was waiting for us at the base and took us back to the hotel. It was a good day to explore outdoor with beautiful sunny weather, a bit windy on top of the mountain but not as cold. We reached closed to 2000 meters today and more ascension is coming in the next few days. So far, our acclamation to high altitude has been good. We were mindful to slow down and eat lighter meals.
No comments:
Post a Comment