Warning: This might be considered long-winded and I have taken liberties with past, present and future tenses and events, sometimes mixing all three in a sentence.
It is the fellow travelers you meet along the way that add to the experience.
I met Lasse on the plane from Iquitos to Lima. He is a television producer/station owner from Denmark. I sat down next to him and we immediately struck up a conversation - until passenger claimed my seat! (I probably subconsciously selected the wrong seat.) We continued our conversation between the seats until the flight attendant made him put his seat in an upright position. He is tall and so he continued chatting over the seat until the lady sitting next to me agreed to change seats.
Part of the reason for the intensity of our conversation was due to the fact that he spoke almost no Spanish and had no one to converse with for several days. I had no one to share my adventures with, either, as the lodge was not exactly hopping with tourists per my last post. Two white people see each other on a plane full of Peruvians and it is likely they will strike up a conversation, I suppose.
Lasse had not been down the Amazon, but he did explore a region more diverse with wildlife than what I had seen. We shared photos and stories. He showed me video of the killing of a poisonous snake, preaching at a local church, and a guide catching a non-venomous snake and moving it closer to the lodge (easier to find and impress tourists). He also showed me pictures of two women in Argentina (?) whom thought were tourists, but turned out to be prostitutes. They let him take some pictures of the street scene at night. It was a slow night and the only customer refused to pay, threatening one of the women with a knife.
It was an interesting conversation.
We said our goodbyes at the baggage carousel, where I gave him my copy of ¨Light and Consciousness¨ that contained an article about a woman who saved Borneo and a thousand orangutans, created hundreds of jobs, and altered the micro-climate to bring rain to an arid, devastated region. One woman changed the world - or Borneo. I thought it would be a good documentary for his television station. Maybe by sharing it, he can use it to inspire thousands of others. That is my mission right now - inspiring others to do good things.
Lasse headed off to Cuzco and I headed to the bus station. Truthfully, if I was single, I would have followed him to Cuzco.
That got me to thinking that this is my first vacation that does not include my husband, family, friends or work in 20 years. The last one started with a a mugging. This started after a robbery.
...
I took an airport taxi to the bus station. I know I could have saved money by going outside the airport and hailing a cab, but that is a less secure option and I don´t need the hassle of ruining my trip to save $7. Besides, I now how expensive airport licenses are and how hard the airport taxi drivers work. I have a particular affinity for airport taxistas after my infamous Nicaraguan carjacking experience. We started chatting. This driver has a wife who works at the hospital and three grown children - two daughters and a son. He has been a driver for 30 years, 20 of them at the airport.
Passing through Lima, I was glad that I had decided not to spend anytime in the big city. Looking at some of the structures, I would be surprised if they withstood an earthquake. Scary!
We made it to the bus station and my driver shook my hand and kissed me on the cheek. The ride was worth the price, which happened to be the same price as my ticket from Lima to Paracas. Oh well, it was a published fare.
I was a bit nervous about taking a Peruvian bus given all the infamous stories of buses careening off cliffs in the country. All the guide books said use Cruz del Sur. I wasn´t sure what to expect, but a luxury bus was not anything I was prepared to experience as I stepped onto the double-decker bus with reclining seats, dinner service, wi-fi, and a computer station with MS office and USB ports. Then there is the safety video that must be viewed to fully appreciate. In short, the video is much like what you see on a plane nowadays, except funnier.
The video starts with information that all buses have two drivers and that they change very four hours. Then come the warnings of how to break the windows in case of emergency. And to only urinate in the toilets. If you have other needs, you are to contact an attendant who will inform the driver and arrange to stop when convenient. In fact, this is such an important message that it is repeated twice. Toilets are only meant for urine. Also, it is against the law to smoke in public places, so ¨Don't´t smoke, please!" It is also against the law to disable a seat belt. If you do, you will be reported states the stern voice emanating from the video screen. Wearing a seat belt on a bus is the law, the video repeats over and over. Given the history of bus accidents here, even hard core Libertarians would agree with this law.
Heading south, Lima seems to go on forever. I had no idea it was such a huge city. Eventually, the apartment buildings and concrete houses give way to seemingly endless concrete factories carved out of the hills along the Pan American. The landscape can only be described as industrial.
Political signs are the only art that decorates the ugly landscape. No al paro! No al Terror! Fraternidad 10 Feb 2009! And Fujimori: Libertad! Fujimori innocente! Keiko fuerza 2011! I guess you wouldn´t call that art, even in the loosest of terms.
I apologize. There is religious art. Crosses dot the highway, some with blue doll house-sized masoleums or roadside alters if you will. There are lots of these.
My thoughts go back to the morning news. A man killed the brother of a woman he loved. A six-year-old is disfigured after being mauled by a pit bull. A crash on the Pan American is caught on video by the on-board camera of a truck driver.
My gruesome thoughts are interrupted by the movie playing, a fantasy that I think might be part of the Lord of the Rings series, an assumption I later made based upon the lengthy credits at the end that included New Zealand. Why is it that all battle scenes must bast more than 200 decibels of raw sound? I wish the sound was optional. Headphones for those who want to endure the excesses of Hollywood sound technicians. I am even more sensitive because of the tranquility of the Amazon. I read that these excess sounds are disturbing the energy field that keeps people from consciousness. It seems like a deliberate plot.
Preceding the video was a video describing the evils of pirated movies. I immediately thought of the pirated music and video salesmen directly in front of the police station in Rivas. Barry Gibb, Juice Newton and the guy known as "Meatloaf" would be billionaires if Latin Americans paid royalty fees on their bootleg music.
More crosses. And half-finished structures litter the landscape like an abandoned Siberian gulag relocation program. Mountains and sand dunes along the side of the road just 30 feet from the two-lane highway. Concrete houses and straw mat houses, like a cheap beach scene. A random house with roses in the front. The Restaurant Kevin - straw mats tied to four posts with no roof and nothing inside to ever suggest even the smallest of restaurants ever existed there.
The landscape grows bleaker, something I didn´t think was possible. We are in the desert, a desert without a name. This wasn´t part of the guide book.
I am not sure where we are. I think we should be nearing Pisco. All I see are houses wrapped in plastic stamped "US AID¨ along the wrappers. This is a first for me.
We pass a truck loaded with bricks. Two men sleep on top, oblivious to the jostling below their heads. It's a scene I have seen many times in Nicaragua.
Plastic bags and bottles continue to trash the landscape, along with the remaining shreds of blown out tires. It is so barren that I would almost call it hell. Purgatory at the very least. It is the antithesis of the Amazon.
Suddenly palms appear in the midst of the sandcsape. A former oasis?
More thatch houses, these with corrugated metal doors that look oddly out of place on structures that can be broken into with a pocket knife.
Donde es Pisco?
The people are dressed in bright colors, a stark contrast to the bland landscape. A small boy with over-sized work gloves helps a man with a wheelbarrow full of dirt and sand. An old woman in a bright teal coat, bent over at the waist with an empty basket resting on her haunch. Sunflowers in front of a sand colored house.
The sun is quickly moving toward the horizon. Between the haze and the black smoke from the burning trash and the tinted glass, it seemed like dusk was approaching for the past two hours.
Signs of life: a recently planted citrus orchard. The trees are three feet tall.
We arrive in Paracas, never stopping in Pisco. I cannot figure out where Pisco is, and I am surprised by Paracas because it doesn´t appear to be an actual town in the guidebook.
...
You would think that after years of bad advice, I would know enough to never trust a guidebook. (The Lonely Planet Nicaragua erroneously called the first English bookstore in Nicaragua, one that briefly sold the author´s personal guide to southern Nicaragua, a ¨book exchange¨, hence the reason I will not sell The Lonely Planet in my store.) The guidebook in question, Rough Guide to Peru, stated that while the earthquake of 2007 devastated Pisco, there town still had hotels and limited internet access. It stated that Paracas was a park and there was no lodging. Well, something changed because Pisco isn´t even a stop on the bus line (hence some confusion at the bus station when purchasing my ticket) and Paracas is a bustling little mass of hostels, ceviche restaurants, macrame and silver jewelry vendors, tour companies and not much else.
After checking into the Hostel Mar Azul ($12 a night for a private room and bath and a view of an unfinished roof and some laundry), I spent 45 minutes in an internet cafe trying to log onto my email accounts. I couldn´t do that, but kids with no visible source of income had no problem accessing streaming violent video games with the volume set at maximum. I finally found another internet cafe with the first decent connection I have had in a week, with the obligatory violent video games and reggatone providing the ambiance that I have come to expect of internet cafes in Spanish-speaking countries.
The reggatone continued all night, until 5 a.m. My dog, it´s worse than SJDS. This really is hell.
In the morning, I was off to to see the guano-covered Isla de Balleste, or mini-Galapagos as it is called in the guidebook.
The morning started off alright, with the tour company rep showing up at the hotel before the scheduled time, always a good sign. At the docks, chaos ensued. No one seemed to know which clients belonged to which tour group. I don´t know if they ever figured it out, but eventually a bunch of us piled onto a boat and we headed out of the harbor. Then we returned moments later to pick up four more clients. Then we pulled out, and then we returned to the docks again to pick up three additional late clients. I would not have been so accommodating if I was the captain or the tour operator, but that was probably because my blood sugar was crashing from having skipped dinner because I had no idea where I was and didn´t want to explore Paracas at night, not knowing there were a bunch of restaurants a block from my hotel, but that´s another issue for which I will conveniently blame the piece of crap guidebook and not my refusal to ask for this information at the hostel or internet cafe.
Our first stop was to view the candelabra carved onto the side of Paracas shoreline, reminiscent of the Nazca lines. There is debate as to whether this is a candelabra or a reference to San Pedro, a psychedelic-inducing sacred ceremonial plant. I opt for the later because the cacandelabra makes no sense, whereas San Pedro has been used for ceremonies as long as ayahuasca has been in use in Peru. The symbol means, "Welcome to the barren desert, but we have San Pedro so that you can hallucinate your way into a pretty landscape."
The Ballesta Islands are incredible and incredibly foul at the same time thanks to the excrement emitted from of millions of birds and thousands of seas lions spread across the entire surface area of these volcanic remains. The islands appear mostly white from the guano.
Note: Okay, that probably isn't the best photo of the guano, but he is cute. If you need a break from written words (i.e. if you are of the sad majority that do not patronize booksellers or libraries and prefer pictures to words), you can pause here and click this link to see some photos of Paracas and the Ballestas islands.
The rest of you may continue reading.
While the stench is not appealing, the hundreds of sea lions, thousands of penguins and millions of birds are the big draw. We saw males fighting for the attention of the females, but since it wasn´t breeding season, the fights were not too serious, just chest thumping bravado. We saw several baby seals nursing from their mothers, resting atop their bellies in the sun. Starfish and sea urchins clung to the sides of the rocks. It was just like a documentary on the Nature Channel. Pictures do a better job at describing the scene than my words possibly can.
Because the boat was half an hour late returning to the docks thanks to the tardy passengers, I had just enough time to change my clothes to get ready for part two of the day´s adventures, a tour of Paracas Park. The tour company representative said I needed shorts and a short-sleeved shirt for Paracas because it is warmer there. That left me no time to grab lunch. There are no street vendors selling emapandas or other goodies, just little pulperias selling Pringles, Oreos and other processed junk food. (Note: One of my many pet peeves is the inability to purchase real food in small grocery and convenience stores almost anywhere in the world, but especially in the US or Latin America.) I grabbed some trail mix from my backpack and waited in the lobby for the guide to pick me up. I waited and waited and waited, long enough that I could have gone to a restaurant for lunch.
The rep showed up 20 minutes late, then we waited another 10 minutes for the driver to appear. In the meantime, another couple showed up (late) in shorts and short sleeves and asked if the clothing was appropriate because it was kind of cool. Yes, it is much warmer in Paracas reassured the guide. They inquired about the delay and the guide said the driver had an emergency with his daughter, which was a lie because it was the same driver of the boat, and he was chatting with a man in the plaza across the street the whole time we were waiting. After the thirty minute delay, we walked across the street to the bus where we waited for more late passengers. The last passengers show up with luggage and a screaming baby in tow. I am not sure ofthe purpose of the luggage or the screaming baby. There was no room for the bags, so the husband and son returned the luggage to the hotel. Sadly, they did not leave the screaming baby at the reception desk or in the room. Another delay.
Finally we leave in a ratty mini-bus, light bulb dangling from the interior and mirrors that look to be a hundred years old. There is almost no padding in the seats and it is not an embellishment to say that it was the loudest vehicle I have ever had the displeasure of riding in.
Thankfully, Paracas is not that far away. Unfortunately, it´s not worth the trip. It is simply desert, barren desert, that abuts the coast. It makes for a pretty picture, but even for a photo whore like me, not worth the time and aggravation to get there.
(Note: I have looked at my photos since writing that statement and I may have to acquiesce that four hours of hell on wheels and nasty fried chicken might be worth the discomfort for some of the photos.)
Our first stop was to view the famous cathedral rock structure, but because it was partially destroyed in the 2007 earthquake, the cathedral part is hard to see. Not that there is much else to see. No plants. No birds. No animals (though a few foxes evidently live somewhere in the desert, preying upon birds at night).
The same guide book that said the bus a.) always stops in Pisco and b.) the earthquake did some damage, but Pisco is mostly restored (which is surprising because I never knew we drove through Pisco, the village of shacks and houses with US Aid bubble wrap) also said that c.) Paracas is wonderful and to truly enjoy it, you should be prepared to camp there for a few days. OMG!! Where do they find these writers, in the crack dens of Congress Washington, D.C.?
So the trip thus far is not worth it. I am here. I am cold, too, often putting my cardigan sweater over my short-sleeved shirt, despite the blazing sun. I should make the most of it, but I really don´t want to be in this death trap of a mini-bus that goes a third of the speed of the slowest moving taxi in Peru. Unless your idea of heaven is hanging out in an arid wasteland next to an ocean (with strong rip-tides), skip Paracas. Just look at the pictures. That would have been enough to sate my curiosity.
Instead, I am squished in the bus with no lunch. I get kind of cranky when I don’t eat, if you haven´t noticed.
But I do get to eat. There are three fish restaurants in the park. The guide suggests we eat at only one restaurant, the restaurant for which he will receive a kickback or a free lunch, so we should all eat together in this one restaurant he repeats over and over. The restaurant does not serve chicken, so I am screwed. He mentions that one of the other restaurants serves fried chicken. Then we get to the restaurants and I know I have died and gone to hell, as there are least ten tour buses parked outside. This violates my rule that I will never eat a restaurant with a tour bus in the parking lot. Sadly, I have no choice because the lack of glucose is making me near homicidal.
I order fried breast of chicken, asking that they not use the oil from the fish and seafood because of my allergy. What I receive is a chicken breast fried in oil. Without breading. It is a huge piece of oil-glazed chicken, sliding all over the plate. I try to make the best of it, using the one paper napkin to blot off the grease. Hoping to mask the flavor of the vegetable oil with some lime or lemon, I tried to catch the waitress, but just then another dozen tour buses barreled through the parking lot, chock full of pasty white tourists and clueless teenagers. This is the exponential version of Dante's Inferno. It took stepping into the kitchen to get a lemon because the service was what the casual observer might call lackluster with a strict avoidance of eye contact and general lack of awareness of the most basic needs of the customer.
I had food, so I should not complain. At least the blood sugar stabilized. I will probably die of a heart attack within hours.
...
No such luck. After arriving back to the thriving metropolis of Paracas, I wandered down to the beachside restaurants at dusk and selected the one with the best lighting for reading and drinking beer. The menus were all the same.
The owner had a menu in my face before I could even sit down. I was still standing when I said more to myself that I could have the vegetable pasta, which at $8 was the most expensive thing on the menu. "What would you like to drink?" he asked before I had made up my mind completely that I would eat there.
"Cerveza pequena," I replied and he disappeared into the kitchen. Moments later he returned with a glass and put it on the bar, only to immediately disappear into the kitchen again and then all hell ensued.
I didn't get an exact translation of the conversation in the kitchen, as the teenage daughter was wailing at the top of her lungs that her parents didn't understand something and the mother was yelling above the shrieks and wails to let her husband and the father of the teenage girl know that she did understand and the father was yelling just to be heard, but his voice was drowned out by the ten-year-old daughter's ping-pong pitch as she tried to play peacekeeper between mother and teenage daughter. It involved a boy who was hiding in front of the restaurant, glancing toward the kitchen now and then, hanging his head in shame.
Just to prove they are part Greek or Italian, someone in the kitchen began slamming pots on the floor.
I was amused by the situation, wishing that they had served me the beer before the arguing began because the family feud deserved to be accompanied by an alcoholic beverage. I also wondered if the banging of pans meant that someone had started boiling the water for my spaghetti and vegetables.
After a few minutes of eavesdropping, I grew bored and tried to read my book, "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson. Turns out the book was more boring than the conversation in the kitchen, which ended with the daughters storming out and rushing to the seawall where they met up with the teenage boy accused of deflowering the teenage daughter.
"Anatham" has to be the worst book I have ever read, though at ten pages, I only read one percent of the book. That was ten pages enough to know that the author spent his high school years jockeying his responsibilities as President of the both the Math Team and the Dungeons and Dragons Club The author decides to invent a new language that is sort of based on English with slightly different meanings and contexts so that you spend twenty minutes just trying to figure out the dialog on the first page and it still doesn't make sense. I had to use the glossary on the first page.
I bought the book because I like quantum physics and story line sounded appealing, plus it had great reviews. It didn't seem overly sci-fi from the description on the back cover. I am usually a good judge of books, impressing booksellers and buyers with my ability to assemble a stack of quallity literature, be it while searching in a garbage dumpster (Goodwill in Sarasota , Florida, before everything gets sent to "The Crusher") or plowing through the shelves of giant bookstores, in just a matter of minutes. I could medal in the sport of book buying, and yet I failed miserably with the choice of "Anathem".
It did not tale long to discover that the reviewers probably dress as Trekkies on the weekend and were also members the Dungeons and Dragons club in college. Either that or they just did not want to admit that they did not understand the book or the glossary and just plagiarized the good reviews to sound smart. Had I read the first paragraph of the book, I never would have purchased it. I just gave up one-third of my portable book collection.
I waited patiently for a beer. Eventually, the younger daughter attended to two other customers who sat down half-way into the feud. The girl brought them wine and disappeared into the kitchen to talk to her mother. The husband/father figure left, not even glancing my way or at my beerless table.
Finally, the young girl came over and made inquiries as to whether I was really having the spaghetti or did I want something else? I didn't know how to interpret this. I mentioned that I really wanted a beer. I didn't get into it with the spaghetti, as it was the only thing on the menu that I could eat aside from fried chicken, which should be obvious to anyone that this was no longer a dining choice on this particular day. She went back to the bar and then scooted out of the restaurant, returning several minutes later with a beer for me.
Then I got my food, which probably ranks as the worst food I ate in Peru. Well, except for the Dunkin Donuts coffee at the Lima airport, but that's a beverage.
At least it wasn't a boring experience.
...
I didn't have a plan for the next day, but in the morning I spoke with the hotel receptionist and she hooked me up with a taxi to Ica and Huacachina.
Given that i could no longer trust the guidebook, I decided that anything the authors mentioned worth seeing in Ica was probably a bold-faced lie, so I asked the driver to take me directly to Huacachina. Now from some reason I seem to recall that I had read on-line or maybe in the guide book (most likely given its lack of credible information regarding the rest of the country) that Huacachina, home of the famed healing lagoon, was 30 kilometers from Ica when in reality it is only 2.9 kilometers from Ica. This was a pleasant surprise.
The journey to Ica was sterile, the same barren landscape that I had witnessed two days ago in the bus from Lima. Upon our departure from Paracas, we passed a dump. We could smell something foul for a mile or so before the taxi passed a garbage truck unloading its contents onto the side of the highway while a bulldozer ran over small piles of plastic bags and bottles and dead bodies given the stench. This is at the entrance of Paracas, home of the National Park and the sea-lion covered islands off the shore. I really should try to get in touch with the Alcaldia (mayor) of the town and offer my free advice that tourists would appreciate it if the town abandoned the area that would normally be considered the breakdown lane (if there was a breakdown lane) and used some other portion of this never-ending desert, which I later discover extends all the way down the coastline, to serve as the community dump.
Just earlier that morning, I was admiring how the garbage men collecting from the bins and cans below my room had separated the plastics from the rest of the trash.
Halfway into our journey, the landscape changed a bit. Suddenly there were vines, grape vines, and fields of them. Ica is a wine producing region. We later saw orchards and vegetable farms and flowers - brilliant spots of color juxtaposed against the pale, sandy plains.
The closer we got to Ica, the more yellow/orange I could see in the sand. By the time we arrived to the outskirts of Ica, I was enthralled to see huge, colorful sand dunes. It looked like the Sahara Desert.
Some passengers in the taxi suggested Casa de Arena as a good hostel for a night, too good a deal to say no. I made reservations for the dune buggy/sandboarding tour in the afternoon before heading down the lagoon to check out the healing properties of the lagoon.
The lagoon is described as a little oasis in the desert. It is surrounded by magnificent sand dunes. The lagoon itself was not magnificent.
What I found at the lagoon were signs that said, "No pisar" - no pissing in the water. The lagoon was filled with children swimming, but not one adult even had their feet in the warm water. I decided to skip the dip and checked out the restaurants and shops that surrounded the lagoon, settling down at the Desert Nights restaurant with my journal.
After spending the afternoon in the comfortable ambiance of the restaurant (which reminded me of my own cafe in San Juan del Sur) with my journal and great music, I eventually made my way back to the hostel for the dune buggy ride.
The dune buggy ride promised to be a permanent memory etched in my mind. A hostel employee said I had the crazy driver. Crazy and dune buggy go hand in hand in Huacachina. In some countries, derelicts are told, "Join the Army or go to jail." In Ica, men who have lost their drivers' licenses and ability to procure insurance are told, "Go to jail or become a dune buggy driver, where you will collect crazy fees from tourists crazy enough to put their lives into the hands of a truly crazy driver. " Es verdad.
When the buggies pulled up in front of the hotel, a genuinely crazy looking man with steel blue eyes grabbed a five gallon plastic jug filled with gasoline and began to siphon the product from a hose, briefly depositing the product in his mouth before it made its way into the gas tank. I was deep in thought, wondering if his saliva would react with the gasoline, when he yanked the now empty jug away from the gas tank with one hand and lit a cigarette dangling from his mouth with the other. How he managed to not non-spontaneously combust into flames in front of the guests is still a mystery to me.
The dune buggy was impressive, able to hold nine passengers and the driver. Single traveler that I was, I was able to secure a front row seat in the contraption.
As usual, the tour operator failed to inform us that we needed to pay admission to the park (no one includes these fees in the tour price), so I had to borrow a dollar from the other passengers, who were scared out of their minds after spending less than three minutes in our contraption of potential likely death.
Then we took off, flying over the dunes at speeds that surely should have produced a sonic boom. I loved it! The other passengers did not feel the same way, wondering how they could ask the non-English speaking driver if he would slow down. I opted to pretend I didn't know a word of Spanish, as I liked the thrill of catching air as we passed over and down these huge mounds of sand.
We stopped for a while and made pathetic attempts at sandboarding. A Swiss national and an American woman made attempts at riding snowboard style - standing up. I tried this, too, even though I have never been snowboarding. I was unsuccessful careening down the mountain in this matter, in part because I had the straps on backwards like a total dork. I switched positions and laid down head first, flying down the dunes so quickly that I let out involuntary screams on the first two runs.
We watched the sun slide over the horizon and then the real fun began - high speeds at dusk with no lights. It was too much for one of our passengers, who was having digestive issues of some sort, so one of the Swiss travelers asked the driver to slow down (because the Swiss were the only ones who could speak another language besides English). I thought the driver would have an aneurysm, but he accepted this act of emasculation with dignity.
Ahead of our vehicle was another dune buggy from the hostel, broken down. Several drivers gathered around the engine block, grabbing and twisting hoses until someone finally decided maybe it needed more gas. Our driver kindly offered his siphoning abilities, probably wanting something to kill the pain of having his balls cut off by the British woman with the queasy stomach.
The dune buggy started and everyone took off. There was little light left in the sky, but neither my dune buggy driver nor his colleague with the stuttering motor felt the need to use headlights. At least my driver was moving somewhat slower over the darkened hills.
The stuttering dune buggy stuttered to a stop. Our driver pulled over to offer help. After a great deal of discussion, they finally acknowledge the obvious - the fuel line was clogged with sand. The vehicle required the direct input of fuel.
A crazy Argentinean tourist came to the rescue. Mind you, he was a paying passenger. Understanding the situation, he took it upon himself to siphon gas from the plastic milk carton jug into the engine. He could do this only while standing outside of the dune buggy, with one hand on the frame and the other holding the gas tube over the open valve. As the dune buggy drove away, the headlights were still not engaged.
It required another stop before the Argentinean tourist could get a handle on the jug and frame, but he did and the dune buggies headed back to the hostel in the dark (but now with the benefit of lights). The Argentinean man held the siphon for more than 10 minutes.
I was relieved to return to the hostel, where bar-b-que awaited. It was lame and the food was interesting and mediocre, but it worked and provided sustenance. I met an employee of the hotel named Tony and we started talking about books. He loves romance novels, so I gave him my copy of "The Zahir". When he got off of his shift, we walked to the hotel bar next door to ostensibly talk books. (He can't talk to guests at the hotel without being accused by management of bothering them.) The book talked morphed into him pouring out his heart about the long-distance relationship he had with a Canadian tourist. It's a story I have heard before and I tried to console him without appearing bored by the conversation, which was all in Spanish. It's just such a common thing for me to witness given my life in a tourist town that it was hard to have much sympathy. Plus I was tired.
Sleep never came that night thanks to reggatone that blasted from the hostel bar until 5 a.m. At 3 a.m., I went to the front desk (wearing pajamas) to complain about the noise. I had to wake up the night manager, whose snores indicated he was oblivious to the 200 decibels pounding through the thin walls. He wouldn't do anything, spineless !&@%^&! and I wasn't about to go to the disco knowing that I might be responsible for killing the stereo system and blowing out all the speakers. I had my meditation CD on as loud as I could take it (and I have nice Bose ear buds), and yet I could not hear it over the thumping monotone of mind-numbing electronic pulses from more than 100 yards away. When the reggatone finally stopped, I could hear the couples in nearby rooms engaging in passionate (but passionless) acts of drunken sex.
At least I have a massage at ten o’ clock, I thought to myself. After returning from a huge and delicious breakfast at Desert Nights, which was preceded by a trip into Ica in a three-wheeled moto taxi driven by a Physical Education professor who moonlights as a taxista on the weekends while on the quest to find an ATM with money inside the machine, I made my way over to the hotel where I had booked a massage for a mere 25 soles - about US $8.50. I met the masseuse and he seemed very nice. He claimed to have studied in the United States. He also had really big hands.
Without going into graphic detail, he pushed the limits of privacy and probably would have had a lawsuit or two against him had he practiced in the US. He really was a good masseuse in terms of technique, the reason I allowed my mind to drift off into the third person and narrate the events in an imaginary conversation with my girlfriends. V would have gotten off the table and filed a complaint, I thought, but A probably would have remained for the session. Both of his hands covered most of my upper back. It was a nice massage.
Now I needed to get out of town before the masseuse tried to track me down, as he mentioned, “Oh, so you are staying at Casa de Arena?” he asked while looking at the reservation book after the massage.
“No, I am leaving now for Lima,” I said.
I went back the hostel to grab my backpack and then headed to Ica to catch a bus to Nasca.
Unsurprisingly, the landscape didn’t change much as the bus hurdled south. This was not a luxury bus - it was a Peruvian line with a poor safety record. I wore my seatbelt.
Arriving in Nasca, I took a taxi to the Nazca airport, where I soon boarded a four seater plane, sitting next to the pilot (another benefit of traveling solo) with two hefty Germans in the rear.
The plane reminded me of a bug for some reason, something with long legs and wobbly balance as it sort of glides through the air. It was awkward. I was afraid that a little pocket of wind would tip the plane into a summersault.
Eventually my nerves calmed as we neared the first of the lines, the whale. I was overwhelmed to see it in person. The lines were difficult to locate and photograph, as there are many lines running across the desert plain. It took a minute to focus mentally and prepare to multi-task, as the concept that these lines can only be seen from above and to appreciate their meaning and longevity at the same time battled with my ego’s need to photograph them.
What surprised me even more than the lines themselves was the proximity of the Pan American highway to the lines.
The flight was a mere half hour. I will return again one day and take the long flight.
Other than viewing the lines, Nasca doesn’t have much to offer the tourist or traveler. I hung out in an internet cafe for a while, then made my way to a cheap and delicious Chinese restaurant where I discovered the shrimp in my soup after my seafood allergy kicked in. Fortunately, there was pharmacy next door and Benedryl was readily available.
Rather than spend a night at a hotel and ten hours of daylight staring at the monochromatic desert landscape, I decided to take the overnight bus to Arequipa. All would have been perfect of it were not for the pre-sleep violent movie with Liam Neeson, which involved a story line about kidnapped teenage girls turned into heroine junkies and prostitutes and of course, included lots of gunfights. I had seen the movie before. I tried to put the meditation music on, but it couldn’t remove the sound of the gun scenes. Each time I heard the gun go off, a little shiver ran down my spine and I clenched my jaw. I had a hard time falling asleep after that.
The bus pulled into Arequipa at 8 a.m. Greeting us at the bus terminal was a kiosk selling newspapers with a picture of a Peruvian bus, the same line I used to go from Ica to Nasca, in a horrible accident. “Eleven dead, 29 injured,” screamed the headline over the graphic images that included dead bodies dangling from the bus. I breathed a sigh of relief that I would no be taking any more long distance bus trips while in Peru.
After checking into a hostel (procured at the bus station), I wandered through the streets of Arequipa until I found a little bakery selling French pastries. I overindulged in hot chocolate and a chocolate cream-filled doughnut. I could see a snow-capped volcano in the distance as I scribbled random messages on postcards to my family. I felt like I could have been in Europe at the moment. I spent the rest of the morning taking photos and wandering through artisan shops, unable to purchase anything because of its lack of practicality and the almost non-existent extra space in my backpack. It takes a lot for a packmule like me to accept such limitations.
I did something uber touristy. I booked a ticket on a city bus tour so I could see the sites outside of the city center from the comfort of a double decker bus. I figured the tourist bus would be safer than a taxi, as rules and stop signs at four-way intersections are almost non-existent in this city.
As I took my seat on the bus, I saw a woman who had checked into the hostel with me in the morning. Her name is Sharon and she is from Australia. We hot it off and spent the next day and a half traipsing around the city together, sharing stories and details about families and talking music and politics and all the reasons we believe 9-11 was an inside job. Yep, my perfect traveling companion!
Arequipa is my favorite city in Peru. I could perhaps live there if it were not for the leaded gasoline and the exhaust fumes. It has a bustling European-style urban center with lots of nice middle class and upper middle class homes in barrios around the city. A river runs through the city as well, providing irrigation for farms, which border the river and comprise a significant portion of the land mass in Arequipa. For a plant ‘ho and French pastry junky like me, this is the best of all worlds. Despite the cheesiness of the bus tour, it was a good way to see the city, especially since I only had two full days and nights in the city before my flight to Cusco.
The second day in Arequipa was one of the highlights of my trip. Sharon and I went to the Museo Santuarios de Altura, where we saw Juanita the Ice Maiden through a triple-paned glass window of a freezer.
Juanita was a young Inca girl somewhere between the age of 10 and 14 (scientific difference of opinion) who sacrificed herself to the gods and who would be reincarnated as a goddess according to Inca legend. She was a beautiful girl and it appeared that she came from a wealthy family. She was probably groomed for this position since birth. Her sacrifice would be an honor.
She traveled several hundred miles across mountains and rugged terrain -in sandals - until she reached the Mount Apampo, where she drank a concoction (fermented for two years) that made her unconscious. She was tapped on the skull twice until she died, at which point she was buried in a hole estimated to be approximately 12 feet deep.
In 1995 a volcano erupted, sending ash to Mount Apampo and melting the ice at the summit, exposing Juanita and four mummies. The burial site collapsed from the ash, forming a river that went toward the center of the crater. Juanita’s frozen body was found perfectly preserved.
She is in amazing condition for her age, which is approximately 550 years after her death. Because we are looking at her today, some say her quest for immortality and reincarnation was granted.
Another quick fact about Juanita: Her umbilical cord was found in a cloth bag. It is believed that when she was six or so, she was given a piece of the cord - ground into powder and reconstituted with water, to heal an illness. This appears to have been a common practice for the Incas. This is now thought to be due to the stem cells in the cord.
By the time I left Arequipa, I was silently cursing myself for not extending my trip and extra week, as I wanted to see Colca Canyon outside of Arequipa. Next time, I tell myself as I board my plane to Cusco where I am to embark on the spiritual/shamanic/yoga portion of my trip.
You can see photographs of this portion of the trip on the Arequipa, Paracas, Nazca, and Huacachina albums.
