Every trip here involves crossing a rickety bridge. Here is today's:
Buenos Aires is where Mario's older kids grew up. Here is their elementary school:
We stopped to see Buenos Aires' balls, I know they need a better name, even the town is called Balls, but it is really interesting. Here is a snippet from Wikipedia about the balls:
The stone spheres (or stone balls) of Costa Rica are an assortment of over three hundred petrospheres in Costa Rica, located on the Diquis Delta and on Isla del Caño. Known locally as Las Bolas, they are also called The Diquis Spheres. These are the best-known stone sculptures of the Isthmo-Colombian area.
The stones are believed to have been carved between 200 BC and 1500 AD.
Numerous myths surround the stones, such as they came from Atlantis, or that they were made as such by nature. Some local legends state that the native inhabitants had access to a potion able to soften the rock. Another claims that at the center of each sphere is a single coffee bean.
It has been claimed that the spheres are perfect, or very near perfect in roundness, although some spheres are known to vary by 5 centimetres (2.0 in) in diameter. Also the stones have been damaged and eroded over the years, and so is impossible to know exactly their original shapeAlso from http://web.ku.edu/~hoopes/balls/intro.htm :
The stone balls of Costa Rica have been the object of pseudoscientific speculations since the publication of Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods in 1971. More recently, they have gained renewed attention as the result of books such as Atlantis in America: Navigators of the Ancient World, by Ivar Zapp and George Erikson (Adventures Unlimited Press, 1998), and The Atlantis Blueprint: Unlocking the Ancient Mysteries of a Long-Lost Civilization, by Colin Wilson and Rand Flem-Ath (Delacorte Press, 2001). These authors have been featured on television, radio, magazines, and web pages, where they do an incredible disservice to the public by misrepresenting themselves and the state of actual knowledge about these objects.
Although some of these authors are often represented as having "discovered" these objects, the fact is that they have been known to scientists since they first came to light during agricultural activities by the United Fruit Company in 1940. Archaeological investigation of the stone balls began shortly thereafter, with the first scholarly publication about them appearing in 1943. They are hardly a new discovery, nor are they especially mysterious. In fact, archaeological excavations undertaken at sites with stone balls in the 1950s found them to be associated with pottery and other materials typical of the Pre-Columbian cultures of southern Costa Rica. Whatever "mystery" exists has more to do with loss of information due to the destruction of the balls and their archaeological contexts than lost continents, ancient astronauts, or transoceanic voyages.Hundreds of stone balls have been documented in Costa Rica, ranging in size from a few centimeters to over two meters in diameter. Almost all of them are made of granodiorite, a hard, igneous stone. These objects are not natural in origin, unlike the stone balls in Jalisco, Mexico that were described in a 1965 National Geographic article. Rather, they are monolithic sculptures made by human hands.
The balls have been endangered since the moment of their discovery. Many have been destroyed, dynamited by treasure hunters or cracked and broken by agricultural activities. At the time of a major study undertaken in the 1950s, fifty balls were recorded as being in situ. Today, only a handful are known to be in their original locations
Whatever the official explanation is Mario tells me there were 3 of these balls at the school in Las Bolas but someone stole one (I have no idea how). They were moved here but he doesn't know from where. They are really impressive.
Mario is 6'2" tall. These are really big balls!
It is true that every place you go in BA you have to cross through a rickety brigde, but that akes it more fun, doesn´t it?? When I went to the Iguazu Falls, everything was a bridge, but the views and landscapes that could be appreciated from those bridges were amazing, mountains, lakes, little falls, vegetation. I´ve also been in the city of BA, I stayed in one of those buenos aires apartments in downtown. People was really friendly and the European culture was all over the place. I enjoyed it so much, I hope you do too!
ReplyDeleteBrooke
Brooke,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, but this is BA, Costa Rica not Argentina. None the less it is a quaint little town and I really enjoyed it!
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