We arrived in the dustbowl that is Nazca looking forward to seeing the famous Nazca lines. The area is proper desert with severe water shortages. When we found out that the local population only have access to tap water for one hour, every two days (delivered by a tanker) we stopped complaining about the low water pressure in our hotel showers.
Before we visited the lines, we first stopped at the site of an ancient cemetary. It is right out in the middle of the desert and was used by civilisations between 400BC and 700AD. As the environment is so dry most of the mummies and items buried with them (textiles, pottery, hair!) have been very well preserved. Unfortunatley loads of graverobbers have had their share of the booty so consequently lots of graves have been ruined, and disarded cotten mummy wrappings (that are of no value to the grave robbers) lie all around. We saw adult and baby mummies presented in graves dug about 8ft down in the ground. Most of them still had their hair - some of them with dreadlocks twice as long as Darren´s used to be! Most freaky. The best ones were preserved in a small museum on the site. These still had the skin attached to them and looked really spooky...
From the cemetery, looking across the desert at the mountains, we could see a huge, smooth, pale shape towering ABOVE them, further in the distance. It looked like some kind of immense grounded barrage balloon. What is actually was, was the Cerro Blanco, the highest sand dune in the world at 2000m.
Next stop was an optional flight over the Nazca lines. Angie chose not to do it (claiming that seeing them on the video shown at the little airport was perfectly sufficient thank you!) so Darren went up in the small 6 seater plane. It was quite stomach churning, so much so that Jeni puked violently for most of the trip. We flew for 25 minutes over the lines and although some of them were quite small and hard to see at first, the overall sight was great - lazer beam-straight lines (over 800) stretching for miles, all kinds of crazy shapes (300 geometric figures) and loads of abstract animal and plant drawings (biomorphs) etched in the desert, most of which have been there for over a 1,000+ years. Don´t believe Erich von Daniken though, they are definately not made for the pleasure of aliens, more likely they were for shamen rituals, water finding (the shapes point to water sources) or processional ceremonies.
After lunch we stopped off at a gold processing plant. This is a site where locals who work in a local gold mine can bring their minerals (copper, iron etc) to labouriously extract the tiny amounts of gold they contain. It is an interesting arrangement where the owner of the site provides all the equipment for free, in exchange for the waste product from the manual process which actually contains 50% of the gold. The owner can then sell this to the industrial extraction process and the miners get to extract the other half of the gold for free. So, everyone´s happy. Well, as happy as they can be considering the manual process is extremely arduous work and very dangerous as they use a lot of mercury. We saw a guy scooping mercury out of a pit with his bare hands! They live for today and, according to our guide, don´t really worry about the future. When they are dead, the risks they took in their lives are not an issue problem anymore. Maybe we can learn a lesson from them?
Next day we drove further north through the desert to reach the tiny oasis of Huacachina. Here we launched ourselves, literally, into the next activities - a dune buggy ride and the chance to do some much talked-about sandboarding. We strapped ourselves into a wicked dune buggy (complete with crytallised scorpion in the top of the gear stick) and set off into the surrounding sand dunes. The dunes looked amazing but were somewhat spoilt by the sight of numerous bottles of water and the ubiquitous plastic bags that litter Peru. Our driver took us on a rollercoaster ride across the landscape, chuckling with self-satisfaction as we both sucked in gasps of breath while teetering a the top of another 60 degree slope. What a fab job! He kept punching the air and shouting "adrenelina!"
Finally we found ourselves at the top of a fearsome dune (after a small trial run) and did some boarding, dude. Well, Angie went down on her stomach (which resulted in a rocket-like velocity) and Darren tried to stand-up but the boards were little more than 4ft planks of hardboard, very heavy, un-manouverable and lost their wax about half way down (so not really the experience I´d hoped for *darren*). We soon decided it was much more fun going down a 300ft hill headfirst. At the bottom of the second run, Angie discovered her trusty 10 year old walking boots couldn´t keep up with her new extreme sports lifestyle and had completely fallen apart with the friction and heat of the sand. This resulted in a Charlie Chaplin style walk back to base once we´d finished the tour that had everyone else staring and Darren highly amused.
In the afternoon we visited a winery where they make the local drink Pisco (a grape brandy, drunk most typically in the cocktail Pisco Sour which mixes the alcohol with lemon, sugar, ice and egg-white). The guide explained the fermentation process but spoke English with such a bad accent that Darren had to try to translate for Angie (I must have a natural affinity for people with speech ´impediments´ *darren*). The best bit was the tasting session, obviously!
Halloween celebrations round here seem to comprise of the local children taking to the streets in packs, hunting out tourists, and holding out their hands for money insisting ´Halloween´. It felt strange not dressing up. Hope you all had a great Halloween...
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