Day 72 - Nazca.

Day 72 – Nazca.



Nazca has figured in my imagination for many, many years. As a kid I read not just the Nancy Drew mystery involving the famous Nazca lines, but also a book where some unspeakable evil uses the lines as a portal into our world, and it’s up to an intrepid boy to stop it – for the life of me, I can’t remember what the book was called. And now I have made up my mind to fly over the lines in spite of my reservations about dinky little airplanes.

Am awake at 5am because I’m cold (Cruz del Sur provides crapulous little blankets), and because the air-con’s been switched off. If there’s one thing I enjoy more than stewing in my own bodily gases, it’s stewing in the bodily gases of a dozen strangers.

Watch the sun slowly rise over the bare mountains which look blue at dawn. The bus negotiates hairpin bends as it descends into the valley. The landscape here is parched, dotted with the odd cactus. It reminds me of the land around Arica in Chile.

At the bus terminal, I come across the ‘vultures’, described by fellow travellers: persistent touts who try to persuade passengers to go to their hostel, join their tour. Their tactic is to provide cheap rooms and overcharge like mad for any tours, so for a flight worth $60, you might pay $100. The Walk On Inn where I’m staying sends a car to pick me up when I call them, and I immediately set out to explore the city. My first thought is to try and organise a tour of the nearby archaeological sites today, then the flight’s booked for tomorrow morning, and then I can get out of town in the afternoon.

Nazca is dusty, but sunny and cheerful, the streets of the centre lined with colourful two-storey residential buildings and shops. Pass a bustling fruit market on my way to the main Plaza. Since it’s just past 8am, not many places are open. Make my way along Bolognesi, the main drag, checking the places on my map. Pop into Alegría Tours at the namesake hotel, since it’s been recommended in all the guidebooks.

The guy at the desk points me to a small middle-aged man. I introduce myself, flash the Rough Guide to Peru and Leo the guide immediately talks to the girl taking tour bookings, telling her that since I’m a guidebook writer, I should come along for free. She refuses to book me on the tour at all, saying that it’s a private group, and tells me to come back in the afternoon. Leo furtively takes me aside and tells me to wait at the Ovalo – the roundabout a block away. A minute later, the minibus pulls up and Leo motions for me to hop inside, explaining to the group that I’m an illicit passenger.

We drive out into the sun-bleached desert near Nazca, to the Chauchilla cemetery, one of the town’s biggest attractions after the Nazca lines. Nazca’s a bit of a one-day town; most people come here to fly over the lines, then maybe fit in one of the nearby archaeological sites in the afternoon, and then they get out of town by the evening, flying on to Cusco, catching a bus to Arequipa…

First, there’s a modern cemetery, used by local farmers. The colour of the crosses signifies the age and gender of the dead: white for children, black for married adults, blue-green for teenagers and light blue for single women. There’s an awning made of woven dried cane for buses to park under, and a path marked with white stones leads towards the uncovered tombs. Leo explains that the tombs have been looted at will by numerous grave robbers, who’ve come here to look for pottery and gold to sell to tourists on the black market. The plain is scattered with human bones and shards of pottery.

The uncovered tombs are under similar cane awnings, and Las Trancas, the community now in charge of the cemetery, has carefully arranged the surviving mummies in the pits along with their belongings, and has carefully placed the loose skulls and bones in the pits as well. Leo explains that the men had shoulder-length hair, the women had hair down to their waists, and the chiefs had the longest hair of all, so we all guess the gender of the mummies, sitting in their pits in foetal positions. These are all Nazca mummies, dating back to 400BC – 800AD. They all sit, facing east, because the Nazca used to worship the sun. Leo tells us that he’s surprised, because even yesterday some of the pits didn’t have mummies in them; this means that whoever had them in their back yards is now returning them.

“The Nazca mummified everybody – rich, poor – and everyone was buried in the same cemetery with their belongings, to be used in the next life.” A child mummy sits next to a mummy of a parrot – a beloved pet. Some of the mummies are missing their heads. Some have mortars and pestles next to them, which the women would have used for cooking. One male mummy is so wrapped up in textiles that he looks like he’s wearing a puffa jacket. I’m into mortality and human remains, so am loving the cemetery.

Moving on, we stop at a pottery workshop, where the family uses traditional techniques and museum catalogues to create replica Nazca and Moche pottery, up to and including the use to paintbrushes made of replica baby hair. The whole process is interesting, and I end up getting a Nazca plate for my parents. I don’t think they’d appreciate the explicit Moche pots which feature every type of sex imaginable – from anal to bestiality. The Moche were big on fertility.

Since prospecting for gold in the nearby hills is a good way for Nazca residents to earn money if they haven’t learned any trade and are only capable of unskilled labour, we visit a gold processing workshop also, where the guy in charge demonstrates the scale models of the equipment they use and then we go out back to where salsa is blaring from the radio and several young men are balancing on wooden boards on top of giant metal cylinders, moving from side to side to crush the rock underneath. They keep it up for a few hours, and that, combined with five days a week in the hills, is how they make maybe $200 a month.

After dropping me off at the Ovalo again, Leo makes plans to meet me for a private tour in the afternoon for ‘a reasonable price’.

Stumble upon the Cevichería El Limón, a lime-green place full of locals which does superb ceviche and seafood-fried rice. The World Cup is unavoidable.

“I’m a freelance guide. I work for several different companies, but today I’m free,” Leo tells me. We go off to the Paredones, the area on the outskirts of Nazca where the ancient Cantayoc aqueducts are located. I’m expecting something like the Roman ones in Spain, but they turn out to be stone spirals in the ground, leading down to the water. “It used to be possible to go from one aqueduct to another, but since the last earthquake it’s been forbidden.” They are still being used for the irrigation of the nearby fields.

A guy dressed in a robe with feathered headgear is leading a gringo couple around. They descend along one of the spirals to the water, where the shaman instructs the girl to wave her hands above the outstretched palms of her partner. Leo tells me that some credulous people believe that the aqueducts possess some kind of mysterious energy. As far as he’s concerned, the shaman is a charlatan who’s ripping off the couple.

He points out a desert plant with huge spikes, which local farmers plant around their fields as natural barbed wire, the carob trees which the goats and the pigs love, and whose pods are used to made algarobina – a sweet chocolaty liquid. We then go up a dusty little hillock to look at Las Agujas – The Needles. I’m expecting some tall, thin rock formations, but they are, in fact, long, thin triangles etched perfectly into the desert plain by the Nazca. Why? No one knows, just like no one really knows why they etched the giant figures of animals which can only really be appreciated from the air.

As Leo walks me around the Paredones ruins – where the Inca ruler stayed when visiting the area – he points out the pits dug all over the landscape. “These were also done by grave robbers. Since the rich and the poor were buried in the same place, they keep digging until they find a mummy buried with gold or pottery.” As we look down into the ruins, a small feathered head with round yellow eyes pops up – it’s a desert owl. I’ve never seen owls which are a) out during the day and b) which dig holes in the ground. Nearby is a burrow where it must live.

When Leo drops me off, he offers to take me the Cahuachi ruins the next day after my flight provided he’s free. “It’s best to go in the morning because in the afternoon the wind picks up and there may be a sand storm.” Debate rejecting his offer in favour of Cerro Blanco – the world’s biggest sand dune that looms beyond the town, and a hot destination for sand boarders. Hot literally; the girl at reception informs me that a trip to the dune involved a 5am start and a three-hour uphill slog. Next time, perhaps. Call Leo and confirm tomorrow, making up my mind also to stay another night.

In preparation for tomorrow’s flight, I go to the Maria Reiche Planetarium at the posh Nazca Lines Hotel. Maria Reiche was a German mathematician who devoted her life to studying the Nazca lines, and the show at the small planetarium discusses her theories and proves to be rather interesting. She believed that the lines were a giant astronomical calendar and that several of the animals are aligned with various constellations – the giant monkey with the Big Dipper and the giant spider with Orion. As for the straight lines and triangles which cross the plain, she claimed that they were aligned with the sun’s rays during the solstices. Her explanations are more credible than those of various fruit loops, one of whom suggested that the lines were created by aliens as landing strips for their space craft. The presentation ends with a look through a telescope at the moon and at Saturn and the Sikh family remains behind to take photos, while I go for one of the worst meals of the trip so far – lacklustre pizza at the Los Angeles restaurant.