Nazca - Geoglyphs and Mummies

I woke up early in Huacachina with hopes of capturing a photo of the Oasis - just like the one depicted on the 50-sol note. I’ve always enjoyed visiting the sites highlighted on a nation’s currency, and I think this is a great tourism campaign strategy. Sadly, I don’t think the US has really caught on to the concept, since our currency tour could be completed with a visit to Washington DC, and a quick trip to Philadelphia if you want to see Independence Hall, which is featured on the 100 dollar bill.

I suspect most readers don’t read my blog for political ravings, but if I was President, I’d recommend we represent more national sights on our currency than just government buildings in DC. At least our quarters are catering to tourism with the states and parks series. Even if they don’t cater to the tourist, who have to figure out how much are coins are worth, since none of them have their numeric value specified. I can imagine a tourist struggling to understand English, who now has to figure out how much a dime is worth, and why this small coin is actually worth more than the larger nickel and penny.

But I digress, back in Huacachina I awoke to fog! I should have suspected it, since fog is a daily occurrence of winter days on the Peruvian coast, but I was moving inland, and I’d had such good luck avoiding it on my trip. Unfortunately, this time it kept me from my goal of capturing a shot of the Oasis, so you’ll just have to Google ‘Huacachina’ to see photos that mimic the view depicted on the 50-sol note.

As the city slept, I took a quiet stroll around the Oasis shrouded in fog, and then caught a cab into Ica. Unlike Huacachina, Ica was awake with morning commuters, and the coughing, sputtering exhaust of diesel commerce. The bus terminal was just off a main road and vacant, except for two other groups of travelers. One was a group of four guys representing the classic ‘ugly Americans’ as they loudly recapped clouded memories of drunken brawls and struggles to get back into their hostels after hours. The one that had started the fights had a nice shiner developing, and proudly noted that he couldn’t remember any of the details. The other travelers were a quiet pair of young ladies that looked like a gap year duo doing some back-packing before they entered the 9 to 5 life. We’d all just came from Huacachina, but the groups kept to themselves, and then loaded the same bus for Nazca.

Our bus took us south and higher into the rolling foothills below the high plains of the Andes. We broke out of the coastal fog, as it was being burned away by the rising sun. Also left behind was the sand; the rolling hills were now covered with more iron-rich red gravel. The hills were barren of vegetation and any other signs of life, but, when we descended into the valleys, they were alive with agriculture and villages.

I had read up on the Nazca lines before departing, so I knew we would drive across the Pampa Colorado (Red Plain) where most of the geoglyphs were located, and I wanted to take note of what it looked like at ground level so I’d have a reference from the airplane during my fly over. The geoglyphs are large drawings that stretch over the 500 square kilometer plain. They were made between 900 BC and 600 AD. The most shocking thing to me was that that the drawings are still visible and undamaged by weathering , which means the plain has changed very little in the last 2000 plus years. To create the lines and drawings, the Paracas and Nazca people simply moved the surface rocks to the sides, exposing the lighter gypsum-rich soil below. At ground level, the minute change is hardly noticeable, and the plain and natural gravel are so consistent and level that it looks almost like it was man-made, as if someone had leveled a construction site and put down gravel for a mega-mall parking lot. Rain has broken up small sections with some drainage gullies, and a few small outcroppings of hills break up the plain, but it still doesn’t look natural.

From the sky, the full scale and design of the man-made artwork can be seen. And, with the modern conveniences of satellite photography and online mapping sites, you can actually the geoglyphs from right where you’re sitting. I did just that before my trip, and to be honest, I probably could have called it good with that online tour alone, but thought it would be a shame to have driven past and not checked it off my life’s to-do list.

There are many theories on why the geoglyphs were created, but the most commonly accepted is that they were religious symbols and part of a large open ‘temple’ covering the entire plain. The Nazca culture and religion was fittingly focused on water, as the desert society would quickly perish without it. Evidence of offerings have been found at small altars across the plain where the geoglyphs are found. Also, most of the drawings are of animals, since nature-worship is common throughout Peruvian cultures. Typically, each animal represents a particular element in nature (i.e. snake or fish for the sea, cougar for the land and condor for the air). Conspiracy theorists like to tie the geoglyphs with attempts to communicate with extraterrestrial visitors; other theories have tied them to astronomy, but most of these theories have been discounted.

We arrived at the Nazca bus terminal and, since I had booked my tour in advance, a company representative met me as I got off the bus. We hiked down the road, and I waited in his office a few minutes before catching a ride to the airport. The airport was tiny, but you could tell that tourism was bringing in a lot of money because the airport was very nice and filled with foreigners. Their system of moving tourists through started with paying a ‘departure’ tax, even though we all come right back. From there, we moved to the first waiting area where a NatGeo special about the lines played on a loop. After seeing the video at least twice, we were ushered through airport security and into the final waiting area.

I was flying in a single-prop, four-seat bird with a woman from Germany. She spoke impeccable English, with a slight Californian accent (Valley girl, not Schwarzenegger), and had been in Peru teaching English, but was about to head home. After our pilots gave us a small graphic map of the geoglyphs we would fly over and briefed the route and plan, we boarded and quickly departed. We flew over the majority of the plain and did a figure eight over ten of the animal geoglyphs so we could take pictures and view them from each side of the aircraft. Fortunately, neither of us was prone to airsickness.

After our return to the ground, I had lunch and then met up with a new guide and two other tourists to head out to the ancient Nazca cemetery. The Chauchilla Cemetery was in use from around 200 AD to 1000 AD and then largely ransacked by looters over the years; the site is still littered with bones, shards of pottery, and fragments of other burial trinkets. It was ‘rediscovered’ in 1920, and further excavated in the 1980’s to illustrate their original burial layouts. The site has a series of burial sites with mummies, skulls and trinkets set up in each grave. Each mummy is wrapped in a seated fetal position, arms crossed over their knees, facing east to the rising sun. Beside them are family members and/or possessions, offerings and provisions for the afterlife. Plus, any extra bones and trinkets that were found on the cemetery grounds and were in good shape, but weren’t part of a ‘display’ grave.

What is most impressive about the cemetery is the fact that the graves and mummies have been on display in the open air ‘display’ with nothing more than over-head cover for fifteen years without rapidly decomposing. Apparently the desert air is so consistently dry that they aren’t decomposing any faster due to the exposure as they would in a climate controlled display case in museum. As the Lonely Planet says, this site “will satisfy any urges you have to see ancient bones, skulls and mummies” so, after visiting half of the tombs, I was ready to go. Interestingly, since Peruvians have a history of ancestor worship, each city actually has a ‘mascot’ mummy. These mummies are brought out and paraded around town on special occasions, and some people believe the remains of the first Inca were moved from Cusco to Machu Picchu for religious ceremonies. I would be visiting Machu Picchu in a few days, but at my next stop, Arequipa, the local mummy - Juanita, the ice princess - is the highlight of the local museum.

However, before I headed out on my overnight bus, my tour made a few more stops at local back alley shops/museums. This part of the tour reminded me a bit of tours in India, where you often get dragged to shops, where the tour operators get kickbacks for bringing in tourists. The first shop was a pottery maker, who uses all the original methods and natural dyes, paints and polishing methods that the Nazca use. The family has been recognized by the Peruvian government for their efforts to identify and preserve the ancient traditions and techniques, and tourist can buy the work in the neighboring store.

Tourism is Peru’s third largest industry, after fishing and mining, and in Nazca it is the economy. This was made very apparent as I wondered around town before grabbing dinner and returning to the bus terminal. The central plaza pays homage to the Nazca Lines, another small plaza near the bus terminal has a long mural highlighting all the tourist sites that surround the city, and each bus stop on the main drag has one of the geoglyphs carved in the walls. The only other industry in the valley is farming and even the ancient karez network (underground canal system), which still supports irrigation today, is a tourist attraction. The pervasive advertising had me convinced I should have stayed longer, but I had a bus to catch.

When I returned to the bus stop I ran into the same two groups of tourists that had left Ica with me in the morning. Buses are dependably late in Peru, so as we all waited for our bus to Arequipa, I chatted with the two girls and learned they were from Canada. We compared travel notes and besides their start on Easter Island, before arriving in Lima, our itineraries were pretty close to identical. Our route is so popular in fact, that it is often referred to as the ‘Gringo Trail.’ I was scheduled for a bus departing two hours earlier than theirs, and I was mocking them for their long wait; until their bus arrived before mine. Then, I was apologetically asking if they could use their Spanish skills to find out if my bus was coming at all. Fortunately, it arrived shortly thereafter, and we were all off for the next stop on the Gringo Trail.

Sand Boarding Huacachina

In a guise of being helpful, and an effort to sell me another tour, the owner of the Pisco Travel Agency asked me to stop by his office before I left, because he ostensibly had information on transportation options to Huacachina (pronounced WHAC-a-CHEEN-a, and fun to say). Although I was hoping to leave on the first thing out of town, I figured meeting at nine wouldn’t set me back too bad and he might have some useful advice. First, he told me about the most complicated option of taking a taxi to Pisco, a bus to Ica, and another combi into Huacachina. Then, he told me about a bus his tour company works with that goes directly to Huacachina. It was leaving in two hours, he could reserve my seat for 20 sols, and this led into his sales pitch for the tours he offered for Dune Buggies and Sand boarding. Finally, he told me there was a direct public bus that I could have caught at seven that morning. If he’d really wanted to be helpful, he could have told me about the seven o’clock bus the night before.

After being let down one last time by Pisco Travel, I headed for Huacachina. The drive impressed upon me yet again how expansive the coastal desert is. As we climbed into the provincial capital of Ica, I began to see something even more impressive: farms. Somehow, the natives of Peru managed to tap into the mountain drainage systems in order to establish farms and grow crops under the most inhospitable conditions, and the locals continue these traditions today.

On the outskirts of Ica, the crops are planted in infertile sand, and manage to grow in a patchwork of farm plots stitched together with barbwire and thorn thickets. And where this blanket of green abruptly ends, the desert encroaches and quickly reclaims any land that isn’t nursed to life by the dedicated farmers.

To further accentuate nature’s efforts to reclaim the farmland, massive sand dunes rise up on the horizon and look as if they have amassed and are now waiting for one final storm before they overtake the farms and city that sit in their shadow. We passed briefly through the city of Ica before turning west into the dunes and driving deep into canyons of sand on our way to Huacachina.

Huacachina is an oasis in the middle of the dunes and was once a getaway for Peru’s elite, who used to swim in the natural spring and bathe in the ‘curative’ mud. Today, the site has been overrun by back-packers, and swimming and mud baths are not recommended. Instead, tourists head for the dunes for dune buggy rides and sand boarding, which is what I came for as well.

The oasis has both a surreal and relaxed feel. Around the springs, they have built a garden/park with palm trees and a walk that wraps around three sides of the pond. Those three sides are also surrounded by hotels, restaurants and shops, and the last side has been left in the natural state with dunes descending all the way down the water’s edge like a mountain beach. Along the edge of the garden, there are also the remains of old changing rooms and outdoor shower trees from a bygone era of mud baths and swimming. They stand in a long row of wooden doors with broken shutters, some wired shut while others still have door knobs that are locked. Through the broken shutters, you can see the small changing rooms littered with trash and graffiti.

The atmosphere, inviting gardens, and assortment of poolside restaurants and bars, could have kept me in town for a week, if I vacationed to relax. However, I was here for the sand boarding and before I even found a place to sleep, I sought out a tour for later that evening. My tour group met outside one of the many hostels in town, and was made up of mostly young Israelis with a spring break vibe. A discussion unfolded in a mix of Spanish and Hebrew debating how extreme the ride would be for each buggy. The guys all loaded into one buggy, and the girls climbed in the other. I assumed the ride would be more adrenaline filled with the guys, which was confirmed by one of the girls who said, ‘What are you crazy? You’ll end up with a broken arm riding with them!’

What we failed to account for was the added weight of all the guys in one vehicle. Instead of a wild ride, we ended up bogged down and couldn’t build up any speed for the hills. Our driver even backed up to get a running start on one of the larger dunes, and ended up getting stuck momentarily. So our promise of ‘Driving more crazy!’ turned into more ‘Driving Ms. Daisy.’ Meanwhile, the ladies were having a great time in the other buggy, screaming and laughing as they flew past us and across the dunes with ease.

Our first boarding stop was at a high point of the dunes, which gave us incredible views of the city of Ica, with the dunes encroaching from the west, and pinned against the foothills of the Andes to the east. The sun was setting, accentuating the lines and ripples of the dunes as they slowly faded to gold and orange.

Everyone poured out of the buggies like clowns out of a car, energized and babbling in many tongues about the wild ride and amazing views. Our guides began to offload our sand boards as everyone began taking pictures of their groups, the buggies and the 360 degree panorama.

I had upgraded for the dune boarding, so I had snowboarding boots on and strapped into a regular snowboard with proper bindings. Meanwhile, the novices were studying their pieces of plywood with Velcro straps trying to figure how they were supposed to ride them down the mountain.

I stood up on my board at the edge of the first dune, tipped my weight forward and slid over the precipice. Once I was moving, I found that sand boarding was very much like snowboarding in heavy powder. I had to lean back toward the dune to keep the nose of my board from digging into the sand. I did a few turns and, just as suspected, the nose of my board began to sink, stop, and I did a slow roll head first down the mountain into the soft sand. Fortunately, sand is a little less startling than snow as it runs down the back of your shirt, but my shorts also grew heavy as my pockets filled with sand. I recovered quickly, brushed off the sand, and finished my first run.

As I worked my way back up the dune, the rest of the group was beginning to come down on their boards. Most were sitting on their boards, or lying on them and riding down face first. Some of the Israeli girls would scream in terror as their friends gave them an initial push over the edge, but as they descended, the screams would change from terror to glee.

A few brave souls decided to try strapping into the Velcro and stand up on the basic boards, some survived, while others ate sand. A girl from Texas probably had the most spectacular wipeout. She strapped in and barreled down the dune without trying to slow down. At the base of the dune, her edge caught and threw her head first into the sand like a scared ostrich. I would have laughed, and many did, but it looked like it hurt. In an effort to save cool points, she recovered quickly and said she was fine, but took it easy the rest of the tour.

The dune at the first stop was fun and good training, but a very short run. At the next two stops on the tour, the dunes got progressively taller and the last one nearly took my breath away. The dune’s slope was about 70 degrees, which seemed like an impossible pitch for the sand -- as if any disturbance would have set off an avalanche of sand -- a ‘sanvalanche’ if you will. Now add that to the fact that the hill was over 500 feet tall, and we had a recipe for a great final run.

I had been hanging out with a German all afternoon, because he was the only other boarder that had upgraded to good boots, board and bindings. He had blonde dreadlocks that hung nearly to his waist and a scraggly beard. He had the look of the quintessential hippy backpacker, and I assumed he was a long-term globe trotter with no aspirations beyond the moment. However, he was also the quintessential example of not judging a book by its cover. He was only in Peru a few months doing volunteer work before returning to Germany to finish his thesis for a Mechanical Engineering masters degree.

We were the first ones down and looked back up the mountain just in time to watch a board fly down the dune without its rider. Since zee German and I had such a good run, we decided to hike back up for another one, and I grabbed the lone board to return it to whoever had lost it. As we hiked up the mountain, and the sand gave way under our feet, we lost one step of ground for every two steps we took. Now the mountain literally was taking my breath away, and if I hadn’t been returning the runaway board, I probably would have given up before we reached the top.

Even thought hiking down would have been easy, the owner of the runaway board was very grateful for its return so he could ride instead. The Texan had recovered from her tumble on the first hill, and set a possible sand speed record with her final descent. The sand at the base of the dune was rippled like a rough sea and she was rattled again as she bounced over the wave tops before finally coming to a stop. My final run was fun, but too short to make up for the strenuous hike up. However, the German wanted to get as many runs as possible and ascended one more time as dusk settled in over the dunes.

We returned to the Oasis in the dark with only the dim headlights of our buggies illuminating and exaggerating the rolling terrain in front of us. The dunes looked like walls of sand as we approached them and then disappeared into a black abyss as we rolled over the top of them. Though it still lacked the top speeds we had hoped for, the reduced visibility made the return more thrilling and had my stomach in my throat a few times.

I finished off my visit with a barbeque dinner at my hostel. It was served family style with a few free drinks and extra wine brought in by some of the other guests, which made it a very fun and social event. I met a pair of sisters from England that had quit their jobs to travel the globe for a year. One had developed a strange case of claustrophobic tourettes from sleeping in too many hostel bunk beds. She now wakes up cursing, kicking and punching, fearing that the bunk bed or roof is collapsing on her. Unfortunately, this also happens when she shares a double bed, so her sister often gets kicked or punched out of bed. And, when they are in dorm, everyone in the room is woken up in a panic wondering what just happened in the dark corners of the room.

After dinner, I happily retired to my private room, where I could get some tourettes free sleep, before my early morning bus to Nazca to fly over the famous Nazca lines.

Paracas

It was day 3 of my Peruvian adventures, and so far I had a taste of cosmopolitan Lima, relaxed at the beautiful Refuge de Santiago, and re-energized on the rapids of the Canete River. I was now entering Paracas, a small, ocean-side town famous for its wildlife. I was visiting to take a tour of both the Ballestas Islands and the Paracas National Reserve, a desert peninsula protected for its fragile desert ecosystem. Pisco is the gateway town for Paracas that had once lured tourists with its colonial architecture. Unfortunately, the town has yet to recover from an 8.0 earthquake in 2007 that destroyed its architecture, and left 500 dead and many more homeless. Therefore, I leap frogged past Pisco and stayed in Paracas instead.

The heart of Paracas consists of a single main road, which parallels a beach-front road two blocks away. After about four blocks, on either road, you find yourself in the sparsely populated outskirts, so if you blink, you could miss it completely. Within this small downtown, it seems Paracas is scrambling to fill the void for tourism in the region. In the town center almost every other building was new, being built, or under renovation.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like the tourism demand was keeping up with supply, because at every meal I ate, the restaurants would only have one or two other tables with other patrons. The ocean-side road was lined with restaurants and the hostesses tried to lour in customers from the empty pedestrian street. A German couple I met noted the same thing as we shared the only occupied table in a street-side café enjoying some afternoon sun.

When the bill came, we noted another trend in Peru: no one has change. Similar to the lost-sock vortex in laundry machines across the globe, there appears to be cash register anomaly that swallows Peruvian coins and small bills. Even in businesses where providing change is a requirement of the trade, they didn’t have change. Since my new German friends didn’t have exact change to pay their bill, and evidently the entire restaurant staff couldn’t come up with change, the staff simply had to knock a few sol off the bill. I noted that this must be why Peruvians are so fond of Obama -- they must have took his promise of ‘Change’ literally.

While I was in Paracas, I also experienced my worst tour experience ever. I had arranged the tour before leaving Lima. My main concern was that tours would be overbooked before I arrived and I didn’t have time to stay longer at any of my stops. However, the company recommended by my hotel was overpriced and under organized. I was supposed to meet my tour operator at his office, but he never arrived. Fortunately, my hostel owner knew the tourist routine and escorted me to the docks just in time to catch the boat for first part of the tour.

The tour of Ballestas Islands was highly recommended and well worth it. The islands are referred to as a ‘poor man’s Galapagos,’ although a more fitting name would be a bird man’s Galapagos. The islands are home to thousands of birds of many species that use the islands as a safe haven, since there are no predators, and fly to the main land or out to sea to feed. With thousands of years of life on the desert islands, and little rain, this meant a whole lotta droppings piling up. In places the droppings were up to 50 meters deep and guano mining became a major industry in the 1800’s.

As you can imagine, our tour guides discussion of the mining industry led to some colorful comments like, ‘And you thought you had a shitty job.’ ‘These miners were really in deep shit.’ ‘White gold, shit that is.’ (A play on the Beverly Hillbillies: ‘black gold, oil that is.’) However, the comparison to gold is slightly accurate since the Spanish even fought the ‘Guano Wars’ in 1865-66 over the mining rights on some of the islands, and Guano was the number one export from Peru in the 1800’s. Seriously, you can’t make this shit up.

Our guide for the boat tour did his best with English, but often left us scratching our heads. A few times, I flipped open my ‘Lonely Planet’ (Lonely Planet, I expect a product placement check!) to answer questions from the crowd or fill in the blanks for myself. After touring the islands for the morning and watching the daily migration to shore, we headed back to the mainland ourselves. I was kind of surprised the tour was over, since I my Lima hotel had said it was a day tour and included a chance to go swimming. However my tour company rep was nowhere to be found, so I returned to my hostel and changed out of my swimsuit.

A few minutes after I changed clothes, my tour rep came to my hostel and said I needed to come with him to catch a bus for the afternoon portion of the tour. I grabbed my camera and followed him out. We went back down to the beach-side road, and he told me to wait while he rounded up the rest of the guests. He came back a few minutes later with some additional passengers and then led us all around the block as he talked frantically on his cell phone. We followed him around for a while. He had us wait in the town plaza a while. Eventually two vans arrived, but instead of starting the tour, we took another detour for gas first.

After all the delays and organizational missteps, we were finally off on our tour of the Paracas National Reserve. Except for a few additional glitches: First, like most tours in Peru, admission fees to the park were not included. Second, no one had change when we tried to pay, so they had us pay on the way out. And third, our English-speaking guide only spoke Spanish. Luckily another group had a bilingual so we tagged along with them.

The first few stops went smoothly, but just before we stopped for lunch, we reached our swimming stop. Unfortunately, none of us had our swim gear at this point. After the botched swim stop, we proceeded to lunch. As we traveled to a small hamlet of restaurants set in a small fishing cove, our guide recommended the last restaurant and said they gave the tour free Pisco Sours. We took his advice and sat down in the restaurant, only to watch him switch from guide to waiter. Apparently this was his family’s way of drumming up business for their restaurant and bringing in extra cash… have Ricco get a job as a tour guide and then bring the tourist directly to the restaurant. The food was alright, we never got our Pisco Sours and, shocker, they didn’t have correct change.

On the return to town, our guide attempted to break the land speed record in our beat-up van. I had heard that Flamingoes winter in the Reserve, so as we flew down the dirt road, I asked if we could stop and to his credit, he did. However, he stopped on the opposite side of the bay from where the Flamingoes and lookout point were located, and proceeded to explain that they spend summers here not winters… so either the guidebooks were wrong on both accounts, or he simply didn’t want to take the time to stop at the right location.

After staring at the empty stretch of desert plain and shimmering bay in the distance, and listening to our guide explain all of this in Spanish for five minutes, we loaded back up and returned to town to conclude the worst tour I’ve ever had. What was the company you ask? That would be Pisco Travel, located in Paracas, I highly recommend you look for other options and bring plenty of small bills.