(Stomach-churning) Planes, Boats and Buggies

Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Nazca, Ica, Peru
On Sunday, our tour group had a late start which was just as well considering the alcohol consumed the previous night. We caught a 1pm public bus for the 4 hour journey to Pisco, which would be our base for a visit to the Islas Ballestas the next morning. We had an orientation walk around Pisco, which didn't amount to much - just the main square, the Plaza de Armas, and a couple of side streets. 80% of Pisco was destroyed in an 8.0 earthquake in 2007 and much of the town still resembles a building site. The evening consisted of a meal in the hotel restaurant followed by a few beers on the rooftop terrace, overlooking the building site around us.

In the morning (after very little sleep as Pisco was partying till 4am, maybe due to the Presidential election results), we took a trip to Islas Ballestas, also known as the "Poor Man's Galapagos". I don't get sea-sick but nearly was on the boat ride ride over - imagine a speedboat skipping over the waves on a choppy ocean. The islands are teeming with wildlife, mainly sea-birds (100,000s of them) but also sea-lions, and it is possible to see dolphins, sharks and whales occasionally. The bird and sea-life is so prolific thanks to the cold Humbolt current meeting with warm equatorial currents. This stirs up nutrients from the seafloor which feeds millions of anchovies which in turn feed the sea-lions, birds and other wildlife. The Islands also have a rugged beauty of their own - sea-battered cliffs soaring out of the ocean and wave-eroded arches straight through some islands. The islands are famous for guano (bird droppings), a nitrogen-rich fertiliser that was Peru’s prime export in the 19th century. In places the guano is 4m deep, although it is said some deposits were 50m deep. Over-harvesting means the guano is now only mined for three months of the year, meaning the birds remain undisturbed for most of the time. With the amount of birds flying overhead, a lot of guano now falls on tourists' heads - it was important to wear a hat! On the way to the Islands, we saw the Candelabra, a three pronged giant figure etched into the coastal hills. The geoglyph is over 150m high and 50m wide. No-one knows it´s purpose but there are a number of theories including links to the Nazca Lines and a navigational guide based on the Southern Cross.

We then took minibus taxis for a 2 hour trip to Huacachina, a small oasis town in the desert to partake in some sandboarding and dune buggies. The dune buggies were crazy, with the usual South American crazy drivers. The more you screamed, the faster they went. Tearing up massive dunes, as they reached the edge, they slowed down - the slower they went as they reached the top, the bigger and faster the descent on the other side of the dune. I gave the sandboarding a miss, but others went down about three dunes of increasing height and steepness - belly down on the board, elbows tucked in, legs lifted for more speed, mouth shut unless you wanted a gobful of sand, and away you went.

We then drove about two hours to Nazca in "vintage" American taxis (ie. old jalopies), ours was a 1978 model. We passed beautiful mountain scenery as the sun was setting, the road zigzagging through steep valleys and over high mountains. We spent overnight at the Nazca Oasis on the outskirts of Nazca.

Nazca is a small town of ~30,000 people whose main draw is the nearby Nazca Lines, cut into the stony desert by removing the sun-darkened stones to expose the lighter soil below. They are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The lines were re-discovered in 1939 after planes started going over them and that’s when all the mystery started - "Why make giant pictures you can only see from the air, if you can’t get up in the air?" There are over 800 lines, 300 figures, 70 animals from a spider, dog, 90m long monkey (monkeys can only be found hundreds of miles away in the jungle and most likely never to have been seen by people in that area), a spider and a condor with a 170m wingspan plus an astronaut, although that may be a priest with an owl's head. The lines and figures are huge and can only be appreciated from the air. The lines are thought to have been etched by three different groups of people from 900BC to 630AD. Many theories abound about what the Lines are - an astronomical calendar, the ancient Nazcans flew in hot air balloons, tracks of ancient running contests, something to do with aliens, for water and fertility rituals to appease the gods and hopefully bring water to the arid lands.

It was too foggy in the morning for our flight so after waiting around a while, we went instead for a visit to Chauchilla Cemetery which contained brilliantly preserved mummies with their skin and hair and their clothes and tapestries on display with them. Their decorated ceramics, woodcarvings and gold ornaments are displayed in many of Lima's museums. Most of the mummies were over 1,000 years old. The cemetery had been looted by grave robbers and off the main paths, human bones and bits of clothes littered the ground. Grave robbing is big business in Peru, the spoils are sold to collectors for big bucks.




The fog lifted in the afternoon and those of us who had opted for the Nazca Lines flight made our way to the airport where we waited and waited and waited some more for our flights - a wallet-busting US$110 each. They knew when their planes were flying so why they couldn't allocate a time for everyone instead of making us wait around for ages I don't know. I was on a 12-seater plane, everyone had a window seat. The plane flew very low over the desert to give us an up close view of the main formations and banked sharply to what seemed like a near vertical position so we could look directly out of the window at the ground before sharply circling around and banking to the other side to show the other half of the plane. It was one of the most stomach-churningly awful experiences of my life - I've never suffered from air sickness before but on this flight I was feeling sick, clutching the back of the seat in front of me for dear life, and after a while, it was all I could do to stick the camera up to the window and take some snaps of what we were being told was outside and hope something came out later (hopefully not my breakfast). I don't like roller-coasters and I likened the flight to the most extreme roller-coaster possible. Note that I've tweaked about my photos of the Lines to show up the figures more clearly. I was pretty quiet the rest of the day. That night, we had an overnight luxury Cruz Del Sur double-decker coach to Arequipa, it left about midnight, late as everything else seemed to be in Peru.

Links:
Tucan trip: http://www.tucantravel.com/tour/overview/coast-to-coast/sce/?wl=
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