The tour operator picked us up at 6:30 a.m. for our trip up the coast to Caral. On the tour we were just three - the two of us plus a twenty-something girl from Zimbabwe who is a civil engineer working in San Francisco. She was a very interesting travel companion. It took us forever just to get out of Lima. From Miraflores which is a south central district all the way through Lima to the north during rush hour took 1.5 hours. It took nearly 4 hours to get all the way to Caral.
The Peruvian coast is one of the most arid deserts in the world. You drive along and the mountains are just dirt. Not a blade of grass or a cactus. Just dirt. And then you come around a hill and suddenly there is agriculture and a fertile valley, because there is a river. Or you go up over a coastal mountain, and suddenly you realize the mountain is green and covered with a blanket of blue wildflowers. Where does the water come from? The fog. The only moisture this mountain gets is from the fog, and it's enough to turn the mountain from dirt to thriving. If only they could find a way to irrigate the entire desert, this would be the breadbasket of Peru. In the irrigated valleys we saw corn, sugar cane, squash, bananas, peppers, avocados, grapes and all sorts of citrus.
The hills on the outskirts of Peru are covered with shanty towns. People come from outside Peru, find a spot in the desert, stick a flag in the dirt to claim it as theirs. Soon 100s of others do the same, pretty soon you have a town, the government builds roads, brings water and electricity, and you have a new subdivision. Whoever used to own that land is out of luck.
When we were trying to book this trip, we were surprised that there were no big operators - all the tours were no more than 6-8 people. We found out why when we turned off the main highway to go to Caral. Down a narrow farm road and then we turned off onto a rutted dirt road and bounced our way along. Pretty soon we came to a river with hardly any water and had to drive through it. The guide said in the summer when the river is full of water, they have to drive another 30 minutes and then walk a long way to get to the site. Good thing we decided to visit in the winter. That, and it was warm there. Nothing but desert sand and sun. In the summer it must be sweltering!
Caral was a large settlement in the Supe Valley, 200 km north of Lima. It had been known for 100 years, but it received little attention. Then within the past 20 years or so, carbon dating was used, and it was discovered that this site is one of the oldest urban center in the Americas, inhabited between 2600 b.c. and 2000 b.c., during the same time the Egyptians were building the pyramids and Mesopotamia, China and India were thriving. This turned a lot of theories of early American civilizations upside down.
The city has an elaborate complex of temples, an amphitheater, pyramids and ordinary houses. The main pyramid covers an area nearly the size of four football fields. Caral is the largest recorded site in the Andean region with dates older than 2000 BCE and appears to be the model for the urban design adopted by Andean civilizations that rose and fell over the span of four millennia.
The blue flags you see scattered around are to scare off the birds. Huge flocks of sparrows and parrots have been known to come and roost or nest around here, pooping on everything and messing up the scientists' work.
No trace of warfare has been found at Caral: no battlements, no weapons, no mutilated bodies. This suggests it was a gentle society, built on commerce and pleasure. In one of the pyramids, they uncovered 32 flutes made of condor and pelican bones and 37 cornetts of deer and llama bones. One find revealed the remains of a baby, wrapped and buried with a necklace made of stone beads.
Caral spawns 19 other pyramid complexes scattered across the 35 square mile area of the Supe Valley, allowing for a possible total population of 20,000 people for the Supe valley. We were supposed to visit another site - Bandurria - with a huge pyramid overlooking the Pacific - but it was closed. All of these sites in the Supe valley share similarities with Caral. Archeologists believe that Caral was the focus of this civilization, which itself was part of an even vaster complex, trading with the coastal communities and the regions further inland – as far as the Amazon, if the depiction of monkeys is any indication.
And after walking around seeing all this desert, you wonder why they built their city on this spot, and then you come around the corner and there is the fertile river valley. Some archaeologists even believe some of the river may have flowed through the city.
After our tour of Caral, we had lunch there - a typical Peruvian meal - with chicken, sweet potato, potato, corn and beans that were similar to lima beans but bigger.
Driving back to Lima took even longer. It was very windy and the desert sand was blowing over the road.
Then we hit rush hour again and it took even longer to go through town. And it's Saturday! All we know is we are very glad we had a driver who knew what he was doing and we didn't have to drive!!
Clomping Around Caral
Saturday, September 13, 2014
Huacho, Lima, Peru
Other Entries
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1READ THIS FIRST
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2What Armando did before Jeanie arrived
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3Walking til I couldn't walk no more!
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4Carousing with the Carranza Cousins
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5Downtown Lima
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7Good Times with the Cousins Gonzalez
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8Clomping Around Caral
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9Moving Day
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10Lazy Day
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2025-02-13