From Cuzco to Nazca

My second week of Spanish school in Cuzco passed quickly.  My classmate was Michelle, the English teacher from Encina who randomly came to the same school as me.  We had classes every morning and in the afternoons, I walked around the city or visited one of the museums.  Walking was a challenge because the streets are so narrow as well as hilly.  A small car can barely fit between the buildings on either side of the street and sidewalks are rarely big enough for two people to walk together or pass each other.  You can't step into the street to pass someone if a car is coming, and even walking on the narrow sidewalks, you are in grave danger of being taken out by the side mirror of a passing van.  Also, the streets are one lane but sometimes two directions.  I would not want to drive here.  The local market has rows for each type of food:  produce, meat, cheese, bread, etc.  This is how you can tell the pork section.

For my last few days in Peru, I had scheduled a three day trip from Lima to the Nazca lines.  My one hour flight from Cuzco to Lima was supposed to leave at 11 Saturday morning, but Lima was fogged in and the planes could not leave to come to Cuzco.  I finally arrived four hours late and was happy I had booked a private guide.  It was nice to walk off the plane so late and see a sign with my name on it.

We drove south on the Pan American Highway for several hours to Paracas, a nature preserve which includes a peninsula, small islands, and the ocean itself.  Lima is like San Francisco: always temperate in climate and usually foggy or cloudy.  But as you drive south, the sun comes out and the land becomes drier and drier.  The Humboldt Current comes up the coast from Antarctica.  If I understood correctly (unlikely), cold water carries more oxygen than warm water, so as it goes north, the water can't condense, so it never rains.  Sounds odd to me but the bottom line is, it never rains.  They get less than 2 millimeters of rain a year here.  So it is bare and sandy land, with frequent wind storms.

Nonetheless, Paracas is incredibly biodiverse.  The water is full of anchovies which are at the bottom of the food chain, so there are lots of fish and larger marine animals.  Paracas is on the migratory route for birds in the Western Hemisphere and also has a large population of native birds.  We took a boat ride out to the islands which are protected because they are a major source of guano.  Dolphins swam alongside us, and on the islands we saw Humboldt penguins, sea lions, and lots of birds.  The Peruvians consider Paracas to be be their little Galapagos.  On the way, we saw our first Nazca lines - a figure that is probably a cactus but is called the Candelabra.  It is huge - on the side of a large hill.

It's hard to take pictures of birds and small penguins.

The next stop on the way to Nazca was the oasis at Ica.  Again, two millimeters a year of rain.  For some reason there is water underground in some places.  But otherwise, this is the bleakest land that you can imagine.  Nothing grows.  It is not even scrub land.  Just miles and miles of sand and rock.  So if you have lemons, you make ... a sand resort.  We drove in dune buggies up and down the sand dunes.  It was like being on a roller coaster.  We would go up an impossibly steep dune, go over the crest, and drop straight down.  I was in the front seat and it was a white knuckle ride.  Then we stopped at the top of a dune and they gave us boards to go down on.  The first slope was intermediate.  A little scary but I did it.  The second was a baby slope.  Piece of cake.  Then we stopped on top of a black diamond hill.  Straight down.  I got on and the guide gave me a little push, but I looked down the hill and bailed at the last second.  Call me a wuss.

 Finally it was on to Nazca for the main event.  The Nazcas predate the Incas by 1,000 years or more.  The area they lived in is completely flat - like a huge mesa - and it never rains here either.  Complete desert.  So for some reason that no one knows, the Nazcas etched out lines and figures in the earth.  And because of the unique climate and topography, the lines never go away.  And ... you can really only see them from the sky.  The lines were unknown for centuries until commercial flights started to fly over the land in the 1920's.  Of course one theory is that these were really made by ET's.  Why else have figures that can only be seen from the sky?  Another theory is that the lines were for the gods.  Some of the lines line up with sunrise or sunset on the winter or summer solstice, so they apparently knew something about astronomy.

We stopped at a tower and a small hill and I got my first view of some simple lines and forms.  Then I went to a fascinating planetarium show last night that focused on the lines but also a little about the southern skies.  A few days ago I realized that even though I go south every winter to warm weather, this is the first time that I have been south of the Equator.  I'm glad I wasn't a seaman on a ship having to undergo a hazing ritual.  I also realized that I had neglected to look up at night and see the Southern Cross for the first time.  So the planetarium show was perfect.  The guide took us outside first and pointed out constellations including the Southern Cross and the Big Dipper which is very low on the horizon here.  Also, Alpha Centauri, the closest star to the earth is visible in the Southern Hemisphere.  He pointed out three planets in the sky and later set up a telescope so we could see Saturn with its ring and even some of its satellites.

And now I am at the airport in Nazca waiting for my overflight.  It is grey and a bit foggy this morning.  All of the flights are scheduled for 9 AM, but we are just sit around waiting until they say we can have a good view.  This is what I expect to see.

The monkey

The spider