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Published: December 31st 2007
The great pyramid of Cahuachi
Part of almost 30 pyramids, although this is the only one to have been uncoveredWe began our voyage south with a seven hour bus ride. I tell you Australian bus companies, if both Argentina and Peru can have 10 times better service at a tenth of the price, you had better shape up! More movies, more food, more service... and we played bingo! It was a great way for the spanish learners to practice their numbers and you had a chance to win a bottle of Pisco (the national grape spirit; let me warn you right now:
never ever mention that the Chileans may even have the remotest connection with the creation Pisco. Never!).
So we arrive at Nazca quite late where we hit the Nazca Hotel or Hostel (it could not quite make up its mind but it was cheap) where the resident tout or 'travel agent' books you all your tours of the local sights. We made a few tentative bookings, not being able to compare his prices and then spent the rest of the night teaching Ana and Rachel poker.
Aliens are the only answer and I will not hear another one, Maria Reiche
Ana and I decided not to fly over the Nazca lines with others for several reasons.
The brave explorers
Pre-flight. During the flight James felt so sick that he had to make a small deposit. Firstly it cost around US$30; secondly, we had already done it; and thirdly, it was one of the more terrifying experiences of my life. Bumping around in a four seater airplane being swung this way and that to get the best views three hundred metres above the lines absolutely freaked me out. I staggered out of the plane at the end. Plus they were going early in the morning and it gave Ana and I another hour of sleep.
Anyway, what are the Nazca lines? They are huge, beautiful shapes made in the desert that can only be seen in their entirety three hundred metres in the air. They depict all sorts of things, from straight lines many kilometres long to knitting needles to the beautiful animals. The animals (such as monkey, humming bird, whale) are all elaborate drawings of one continuous line that leap out at you while flying over but are extremely hard to photograph.
The Nazca were a pre-Incan culture, dating from around 300BC to around 600 AD. The lines were only recognised for their amazing nature when a Peruvian man flew over them in the 1920s. What gets me is that in the 1930s
The Nazca lines
The shape of the hands. I hope you can make this out the Peruvian government
built the Panamerican highway right through the middle of them knowing they were there, completely destroying the lizard shape! Independent foreign study of the lines only started in the 1940s, finding that they were built over 600 years. Most of the study has been made by a passionate German woman called Maria Reiche who actually lived in the desert for over 50 years trying to protect and study the lines before the government saw their economic potential and decided to protect them.
So why did this culture who had no means of seeing their creations from the air spend 600 years building them? Some say that they are a huge calender with signs akin to the Zodiac with three long lines meeting the sun on the horizon at sunset at solstices and equinoxes. However my favourite theory was espoused by a crackpot Swedish scientist in 1975:
an alien landing strip! This stems from the fact that the Nazca could not see their creation and that one of the shapes, that sticks out like a sore thumb due to its squat unnattractive nature, bears a startling resemblance to ET and is called
the astronaut
.
Our Saviour's namesake
The amateur archaeologist
'This is cotton, 1400 years old![throws it away] This is human bones[poke poke] This is wood 1400 years old [whack whack!]' is an autentico nazqueño
We booked two tours of other Nazca sights of interest in the surrounding area, one for that afternoon and the other for the following morning before we hit the bus to Arequipa. I think we all had second doubts when we met our guide; first of all he could not speak any English and second of all he rocked up in this enormous green 1970s Dodge. But boy did he dispel all our doubts.
Jesus he was called and he was a combination of excellent tour guide and a violently funny character. I am going to try hard and fail miserably to paint a picture of him. Every sentence had accompanying sound effects and much banging on the dash board, he liked to yell often
'¡Soy un auténtico nazqueño!' (I am an authentic Nazcan), he claimed to have met and be personal fdriends with every archeologist and researcher who had ever come to the lines (he was bosom buddies with Maria Reiche whom he praised for bringing the tourist industry to Nazca that had made him rich), he carried a big stick so he could whack cotton fragments, bone or wood yelling
This is 1400 years old!
WHACK WHACK WHACK.
Also his car! This car is so old and the tours we went on were off-road in the desert! He told us he bought the car when he became a tour guide in the 1970s and it still runs today because he treats this car like his wife. He lets no one else drive it, services it weekly and calls it his war tank of the desert.
Anyway, around sunset he took us to
Cahuachi. This is the biggest mud city in the entire world, 24km2, containing about 30 pyramids. Around 350 AD a huge (and quite unexpected) flood brought so much silt that it buried two thirds of the city. Unforunately, this marked its end as the civilisation moved on and the resident priests abandoned it around 500 AD.
Only one pyramid has been uncovered and reconstructed. Why is this you may ask? Because the Peruvian government will not spend a single cent on it. This feature of the government (for whom a major income is tourism) is to become a common criticism throughout these blogs. They are being uncovered by Italian archeology students in their summer holidays as they are
the only ones who seem to care.
I was struck by a thought: why should we be investigating a people who as recent as 500 AD still had mud buildings? The Acropolis was being built 1100 years earlier for example. But that is similar to asking why should we protect Aboriginal heritage when they had not even developed a property system. These people drew massive shapes in the desert they could not see that have survived perfectly for hundreds of years. And we do not know why! That is certainly worth a few soles, especially as a site of 30 mud pyramids is certain to bring a few punters.
The next day we visited
Chauchilla cemetery, a Nazca cemetery that had been completely pillaged by
huaqueros (grave-robbers) over the last hundred years. It is dotted by thousands of craters each of which represents a grave robbed of its trinkets. It was interesting to see the mummies, perfectly preserved by the weather, and even more interesting seeing how they practiced cranial deformation for their royalty, making them look like real live coneheads.
Finally Jesus took us to one of the lines, the knitting needles. He would like us
to say that the lines are flat and that the Lonely Planet lies when they say they are 20cm deep. The Nazcans simply uncovered a white layer of soil in the desert. The red, iron ore rock on the surface heats up and creates a thermal layer 1m over the surface, protecting the lines from wind and other elements.
It had been a blast but it was time to say goodbye to Jesus and head into the mountains.
Colonial capital my left buttock!
Arequipa is Peru's second largest city and is famous for its colonial buildings. I am going on the record here to say that if you like colonial buildings, go to Cusco. It is far more beautiful and untouched. While Arequipa certainly has more colonial structures left standing than Lima, it has the same feel: beautiful buildings in the centre of the city which give way to ugly concrete monstrosities very quickly.
We only had one day there before we moved on, which we thought would not be enough. Having dismissed Arequipa so quickly, the two sights we saw were impressive. The
Santa Catalina Convent is an amazing citadel right in the middle of the
city that housed an order of nuns and was closed off to the public right until about 40 years ago. It was amazing to walk around: so big it has its own streets and plazas with different bright colours, the red district, the blue one, etc. We walked around the cells of the nuns and I decided it was not such a bad life. All of them had these amazing onsuite kitchems with clay ovens, big bedrooms and some had beautiful private gardens.
Next stop was the
Juanita museum. Three tombs had been found on the same mountain top in the Arequipa area and proved to be human sacrifices made by the Inca to that mountain to appease it. The first to be found was a young girl, nicknamed Juanita, who was only discovered because the neighbouring volcano erupted and the ash melted the ice in which she was buried. As she had frozen, despite being exposed for a week before discovery, she is wonderfully preserved. Her right arms looks almost alive.
The discovery is fascinating and allowed us to learn a lot about the Incas. Human sacrifice was a privilege and she had been brought up and
educated like royalty, groomed for her final moment on top of a volcano. The priests and sacrifice
walked from Cusco (a long way away) wearing sandals and chewing coca leaves. We saw a documentary of a scientist struggling up the mountain with every piece of modern lightweight equipment known to man. They were certainly an amazing race.
Whipping: the best cure for malaria
The main reason for us deciding to bring our beleaguered guests so far south was to see the deepest canyon in the world, the
Colca Canyon. We had really hoped to have enough time to do some hiking along the canyon (get just a little bit fitter before the upcoming Inca Trail) but unfortunately we were due in Cusco in a few days time and could not fit it in. We booked an overnight tour up into the canyon.
We left reasonably early in the morning after being introduced to our lovely guide Miley and a minibus full of other tourists. The first stop was at a lookout where we could take in the full glory of Arequipa’s resident volcanoes, including the dominant
El Misti. The bus ride was going to be a long one,
up over a pass 5000m high and down into the Colca valley to
Chivay where we were going to spend the night before getting up early and exploring deep into the canyon. The ride was made even longer because the only CDs they had were worst of the 80s and panpipe cover versions of the Beatles. I do not know why but in the developing countries, bad old music is still incredibly popular. I know there is no accounting for taste but Aerosmith still sell out in Argentina and in Peru the BeeGees seem to be still going strong. I love how catchy bad 80s music is and we were all bopping and singing along in the back except for poor Rachel who seemed to be stuck in her own personal musical hell.
The ride up was long but beautiful. I (Chas) had never been to this part of the Andes and was surprised by how dry it was. The only vegetation was a very tough, sparse andino grass that the vicuñas ate (a small type of camel, like a small llama but with the finest wool in South America; as they are endangered this wool is extremely expensive).
At the top of the highest pass, at 5km, we stopped to look around. There were thousands of cairns, offerings made by local travelers to the mountain god; however I believe the majority were made by tourists wanting to jump on the pagan bandwagon.
Finally got to Chivay where Chas went to sleep and the others visited the local hot springs for a bathe. Chivay seems only to exist due to the local springs and the tourists stopping over. Its streets are so narrow that single vehicles often do not fit. On return from the springs, the minibus met a car coming the other way. The driver asked the car to reverse as he only had a little way to go back and
the driver refused! They both turned off their engines and played a game of stationary chicken until the car driver gave up and reversed.
That night brought about yet another buffet/set menu (of which we were getting very tired but to order a soup off the menu often cost more than the three course meal) and another band and some more folk dancers. We were getting sick of these too but this couple finished with
Oh, I forgot to mention another part of the cure
Before the whipping, if you were a man, you got fanned with the skirt. Women recieved no such pleasant foreplay an as-yet-unseen cracker of a dance. It consists of one of the couple getting sick, lying down and having convulsions. To remedy the ailing partner, their other half
then proceeds to whip them with a handbag! This of course is a fantastic cure as the sick person then gets up and prances around again.
In our previous blog I criticised Peruvian folk dancing for being boring and easy to do. Rachel and James proved this as they were grabbed by the dancers, forced to participate and they both danced at least as well as the professionals (and seemed to enjoy a good whipping as well; the man certainly did not hold back for Rachel as he cracked her around the thighs). The final highlight of the night is when the dancers went around with a hat asking for tips, Delia only wanted to give them 1 sol but only had a 2 sol coin. So what does she do? She quickly puts in her coin and
took change from the tip jar! I laughed so hard I almost wet myself. She made me promise to say that she then spent the 1 sol on churros (a South American deep
fried dough snack) for the group. The walk back to the hostel was fun as it was the day of the patron saint of the town and the Immaculate Virgin statue was duly taken for a spin around the decorated square to a neon lit altar.
Anti-climactic birds
The next day we were off to the
Cruz del Condor, the most popular lookout for seeing condors. We stopped at various towns along the way to bring them the tourist dollar but they were hardly worth the visit. We saw local girls coerced into dancing the
Witti dance, a local love dance, but as they had been dancing for hours and had a few more to go it looked like child abuse. The most common attraction was large birds of prey, tied and trained to sit on people’s arms for photos. It is a disgusting way to earn a living as these beautiful birds never get to fly in their lives! I am ashamed to admit that I paid to have my photo taken with one simply because I wanted to look at one up close but it was such a majestic beast that I regretted it immediately.
We
Chas watching for condors
Lucky the scenery was great or it would have been even more boring finally got to the lookout after a welcome twenty minute walk along the stunning canyon. It was truly beautiful although it ill-deserves the name of deepest canyon. The Grand Canyon is far bigger and, while it is not deeper, is much more impressive. The Colca Canyon looks simply like a small, deep valley. We had to sit munching scenery for an hour and a half before one condor appeared.
I was the first one out of at least sixty tourists to see and it was right in front of me, flying away from me. Poor Rachel went straight for her camera whose memory card was full and missed her only good view of a free, flying condor in an attempt to photograph it. I always feel sorry for tourists who try to experience life through a viewfinder. It was incredibly anti-climactic to see the largest flighted bird for only about 15 seconds after waiting for so long but Ana and I had only seen them in zoos and it is so dispiriting to see these huge birds caged, unable to fly more than twenty feet. So, if seeing the largest flying bird in the world fly through the deepest
Delia learning Twenty-Wan
Mandatory knowledge when travelling with Ana and Chas since Rio. Although has been known to cause mild insanity canyon in the world was anti-climactic, it certainly remained worth doing.
Woman down!
The only remaining piece of excitement is that by the time we had driven the many hours back to Arequipa, Rachel had come down with severe
soroche or altitude sickness. Having gone from sea level up to 5km and halfway back down in only three days took its toll on poor Rachel who had severe abdominal pain and nausea. She refused to admit it was soroche as she feared what implications it would have on the upcoming Inca Trail. She was so incapacitated we were considering changing our bus to Lima and subsequent flight to Cusco. Thankfully Ana’s mother had a doctor friend in Arequipa who came round, told Rach it was soroche, shot her up with Buscopan and gave her a potent
mate de coca (tea made of coca leaves, more in the next blog) and she started on her recovery. By the time we were back in Lima at sea level, she was fine.
And so ended our first ventures in Peru, taking in the desert coast and the desert Andes. The Incas awaited. The title refers to how close we were to
Puno, the highest city in Peru and is on the shores of the largest inland lake in the world (I think), the Lake Titicaca. Ana and I had never been and were desperate to go; it has many unique flora and fauna as well as being the birth place of the Inca and other pre-Inca civilisations as well as still having several primitive indigenous communities living on its shores. All up a pretty special place that we did not have time to see as the Inca Trail was booked and paid for.
Also, as is often the case, we have
two pages of photos so give them a squiz as well.
Lots of love,
Ana and Chas
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Viktor
non-member comment
Hello
It sounds like every blog you guys write have a negative vibe. You guys need a positive attitude pill. If not you guys can catch your flight back to where ever you guys are from.