How Do They Do That?
On The Panamerican Highway, Headin´South
In the words of WB Yeats, it was time to get the fuck out of Dodge. Time to escape from the broke up, broke down, shanty town aesthetic of Lima, and head into the history, the sun, the true Peru. Nazca, baby. The Lines, man, The Lines.
We emerged from under the pall about 200km south of Lima whereupon the sun took a knife to the smog-laced nothing-light and printed the sky with its own design, casting man´s aside. The driver of the bus got a sudden craving for naranjas, and we stopped at a roadside stall manned by brightly clad quechua. It was the middle of nowhere, the desert, with the people clinging to the side of the highway, waving down the traffic, selling oranges, scraping a living. We got out, and felt the South American sun on our faces for the first time. It was late afternoon, and the light was a striking mixture of hues; peach and cream, predominantly, with sun creeping towards rest behind the sand dunes. I felt the warm breeze on the back of my neck and breathed inthe citrus fragrance (the driver was demolishing an orange upwind) and for the first time felt like I was indeed on the far side of the world. A few kids came out from hiding and stared agog at the three far-out gringos staring up the highway into the sun, looking like they´d never before seen light from dark. It was a transition from one world to another, and it felt like paradise at eventime, only with poverty underfoot.
We checked into our hostel, Nazca del Sol, went for a drink, thought deep thoughts, and went to sleep.
Hi. I´m Gino. I´ll be Your Pilot.
The Nazca cocks crew at 6am and ruined a perfectly good dream I was having about being able to slow down time. At 8am we were picked up by a big, gold, beat-up Chevrolet van and cruised on out to the airport. The Lines, baby, The Lines!
After watching a c 1978 BBC documentary about Nazca, hosted by an utter gobshite historian (probably called Tim), we were ushered onto the airfield and introduced to our pilot and guide, Gino. He cut a bit of a dash, clad in airforce whites, and wearing a pair of impenetrable black shades. He grinned, then grunted at us, pointed at a Cessna four seater and told us to get in. Three minutes and one hallucination later, we were flying at speed over the Nazca plateau. Suddenly, Gino banked left at 300m casually pointed left and mumbled "Dere dyou see de wale". As I peeled my face off the inside of the window, I realised we were directly over a giant geoglyph of an orca, or killer whale. Gino grunted again and levelled off, returning his right hand to the dashboard, its natural resting place. We cycled through about fifteen geoglyphs, all brilliantly executed, all monumental. My favourite was the hummingbird, but I was pretty knocked out by the actual lines, especially a 3km long geometrically perfect trapezoid, which extended into the horizon like an arrowpoint to the gods. To think, they executed all this with a few tape measures, simple agricultural tools, and reverence for whatever or whomever kept the rain coming.
There are four main theories concerning the origins of the lines:
1. They were monumental offerings to the gods for fertility and rain
2. They comprised a huge solar calender (Maria Reiche´s theory; more of her later)
3. Thet were a geoglyphic representation of the "shamen´s flight" (holy man takes drugs, believes he can fly, implores local people to give him something interesting to look at while doing so)
4. They were landing strips for little green men.
1,2,3- plausible;
4- utter bollocks.
The Lines, A Sweeping Brush, And A Crazy Old Lady
Maria Reiche. Maria "I´m not leaving until this plateau has been mapped, swept, and tidied up" Reiche. Maria "All I need is a stepladder and some cash to explain everything, and you´ll thank me for it eventually" Reiche. Maria "What´s my line? The Nazca Lines" Reiche.
We went to a lecture in a local planetarium named after the aforementioned. The lecturer expounded on the various theories mentioned above ("the solar calender" one was Reiche´s) while we watched overhead projections of the lines and the stars. The strongest sentiment of the lecture was perhaps the most attrractive; that the meanings of the lines was for the ancient Nazcans alone, not for us. An acceptance of the essentially enigmatic nature of the Lines, I suppose.
Maria Reiche was a pretty cool woman. Originally German, she came to Nazca in her late twenties and devote the next fifty years of her life to their mapping, interpretation and preservation (she swept all the geoglyphs alone, about 600km). When the Peruvian government proposed irrigating the valley (which would have erased the lives forever) she got on a mule, rode to Lima, walked into the parliament building and basically told the entire Peruvian political establishment to cop the fuck on. They did, and the lines are still here.
Ave Maria.
Sitting In the Waiting Room
We went back to the hostel, collected our luggage, and sat in "Los Angeles" a restaurant we had eaten in earlier that day, whiling away the time, waiting for our bus. We actually wound up acting as impromptu waiters. A huge group of tourists crashed throught the door, and the proprietress (whom we had befriended) was clearly in the weeds. We offered to help and in no time were serving up starters to snot-nosed English teenagers. In return, she gave us some biros, but charged us for the beers.
Milk of human kindness, my arse.
Next Week...
The guys befriend a Yank and some Aussies.....
Mark starts to swear at his large and small intestines; they start to swear back.....
The three intrepid hustlers arrive in Arequipa, jewel of the Peruvian southwest........
Two of them fall in love with the hostel proprietress......only one gets a massage.....the "Hefty Women" slur proves increasingly inaccurate....
The third thinks deeply about something he left back in Ireland.....
A canyon is conquered; spirits are crushed.....
Much shite, verbal and otherwise....
All of this, and more, in the next edition of "Hefty Women", your guide to the exciting adventures of three independent souls on a well established tourist trail..
In the words of WB Yeats, it was time to get the fuck out of Dodge. Time to escape from the broke up, broke down, shanty town aesthetic of Lima, and head into the history, the sun, the true Peru. Nazca, baby. The Lines, man, The Lines.
We emerged from under the pall about 200km south of Lima whereupon the sun took a knife to the smog-laced nothing-light and printed the sky with its own design, casting man´s aside. The driver of the bus got a sudden craving for naranjas, and we stopped at a roadside stall manned by brightly clad quechua. It was the middle of nowhere, the desert, with the people clinging to the side of the highway, waving down the traffic, selling oranges, scraping a living. We got out, and felt the South American sun on our faces for the first time. It was late afternoon, and the light was a striking mixture of hues; peach and cream, predominantly, with sun creeping towards rest behind the sand dunes. I felt the warm breeze on the back of my neck and breathed inthe citrus fragrance (the driver was demolishing an orange upwind) and for the first time felt like I was indeed on the far side of the world. A few kids came out from hiding and stared agog at the three far-out gringos staring up the highway into the sun, looking like they´d never before seen light from dark. It was a transition from one world to another, and it felt like paradise at eventime, only with poverty underfoot.
We checked into our hostel, Nazca del Sol, went for a drink, thought deep thoughts, and went to sleep.
Hi. I´m Gino. I´ll be Your Pilot.
The Nazca cocks crew at 6am and ruined a perfectly good dream I was having about being able to slow down time. At 8am we were picked up by a big, gold, beat-up Chevrolet van and cruised on out to the airport. The Lines, baby, The Lines!
After watching a c 1978 BBC documentary about Nazca, hosted by an utter gobshite historian (probably called Tim), we were ushered onto the airfield and introduced to our pilot and guide, Gino. He cut a bit of a dash, clad in airforce whites, and wearing a pair of impenetrable black shades. He grinned, then grunted at us, pointed at a Cessna four seater and told us to get in. Three minutes and one hallucination later, we were flying at speed over the Nazca plateau. Suddenly, Gino banked left at 300m casually pointed left and mumbled "Dere dyou see de wale". As I peeled my face off the inside of the window, I realised we were directly over a giant geoglyph of an orca, or killer whale. Gino grunted again and levelled off, returning his right hand to the dashboard, its natural resting place. We cycled through about fifteen geoglyphs, all brilliantly executed, all monumental. My favourite was the hummingbird, but I was pretty knocked out by the actual lines, especially a 3km long geometrically perfect trapezoid, which extended into the horizon like an arrowpoint to the gods. To think, they executed all this with a few tape measures, simple agricultural tools, and reverence for whatever or whomever kept the rain coming.
There are four main theories concerning the origins of the lines:
1. They were monumental offerings to the gods for fertility and rain
2. They comprised a huge solar calender (Maria Reiche´s theory; more of her later)
3. Thet were a geoglyphic representation of the "shamen´s flight" (holy man takes drugs, believes he can fly, implores local people to give him something interesting to look at while doing so)
4. They were landing strips for little green men.
1,2,3- plausible;
4- utter bollocks.
The Lines, A Sweeping Brush, And A Crazy Old Lady
Maria Reiche. Maria "I´m not leaving until this plateau has been mapped, swept, and tidied up" Reiche. Maria "All I need is a stepladder and some cash to explain everything, and you´ll thank me for it eventually" Reiche. Maria "What´s my line? The Nazca Lines" Reiche.
We went to a lecture in a local planetarium named after the aforementioned. The lecturer expounded on the various theories mentioned above ("the solar calender" one was Reiche´s) while we watched overhead projections of the lines and the stars. The strongest sentiment of the lecture was perhaps the most attrractive; that the meanings of the lines was for the ancient Nazcans alone, not for us. An acceptance of the essentially enigmatic nature of the Lines, I suppose.
Maria Reiche was a pretty cool woman. Originally German, she came to Nazca in her late twenties and devote the next fifty years of her life to their mapping, interpretation and preservation (she swept all the geoglyphs alone, about 600km). When the Peruvian government proposed irrigating the valley (which would have erased the lives forever) she got on a mule, rode to Lima, walked into the parliament building and basically told the entire Peruvian political establishment to cop the fuck on. They did, and the lines are still here.
Ave Maria.
Sitting In the Waiting Room
We went back to the hostel, collected our luggage, and sat in "Los Angeles" a restaurant we had eaten in earlier that day, whiling away the time, waiting for our bus. We actually wound up acting as impromptu waiters. A huge group of tourists crashed throught the door, and the proprietress (whom we had befriended) was clearly in the weeds. We offered to help and in no time were serving up starters to snot-nosed English teenagers. In return, she gave us some biros, but charged us for the beers.
Milk of human kindness, my arse.
Next Week...
The guys befriend a Yank and some Aussies.....
Mark starts to swear at his large and small intestines; they start to swear back.....
The three intrepid hustlers arrive in Arequipa, jewel of the Peruvian southwest........
Two of them fall in love with the hostel proprietress......only one gets a massage.....the "Hefty Women" slur proves increasingly inaccurate....
The third thinks deeply about something he left back in Ireland.....
A canyon is conquered; spirits are crushed.....
Much shite, verbal and otherwise....
All of this, and more, in the next edition of "Hefty Women", your guide to the exciting adventures of three independent souls on a well established tourist trail..
posted by One of Us Three at 9:25 AM
2 Comments:
Hi Muiris and lads. Sounds like you are having a great time and finally beginning to appreciate the beauty of the peruvian ladies. They're good stock...a woman you could love and adore and still know that she'd give you a hard day's work in the bog..if there was a bog nearby that is.
I passed through Arequipa on my travels and went for a tour to the Colca canyon to see the condors. Part of it was a stop off at some of the hot springs. I think it was one of the most memorable things I did in Peru..sitting in an outdoor pool fed by the hot springs in temperatures of about 0 degrees looking up at the snow covered peaks. Try and work it in. It was in some small town in the middle of nowhere. Can't remember the name but it did have an Irish bar. You think you are on the other side of the world, thousands of miles away from all that is familiar and there is an Irish bar. God bless the craic.
Where to next?
Diarmaid's travel tip of the day:
There is a really nice Peruvian beer called Cristal. Drink lots of this.
All this talk of 'lines' has me thinking you're in Columbia.
Muiris, did you bring your geetar to serenade the senioritas?
Dave do they worship you as a 'Tower God'?
Canney, I dont care about you, Canney.
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