I was fairly immobile for the first part of the week. As luck would have it I caught a touch of “la gripe” in the jungle. This was compounded by the fact that insect bites had left me looking like someone stricken with a case of chicken pocks. On this note let’s just say that applying DEET in the Amazon was ineffectual at best. In fact the running joke was that “it DEET nothing at all.” So here I was back in the city sneezing, hacking, coughing and itching. It was nothing a few days of bad TV and movies couldn’t cure though. This is not to say that I did nothing but rather I limited myself to armchair anthropology to in and around Lima. I decided to do a tour of the cevicherias and find out who had the best ceviche here in Lima. This proved a harder task than I had imagined namely because all of the seafood here is equally fresh. Using that as a first line barometer proved pointless. I ended up looking for who had the best hot and sour balance. Ceviche here is as simple as it gets – lemon, red pepper, red onion and sole scallops. The winner was a place in Miraflores called Pescado Capitales. The runner up was a place called Tanta. Ceviche is only served from noon until 5:00PM so the sampling window was reduced to lunchtime only. The other problem that I ran into was that after the first ceviche I would invariably move on to either the wood grilled baby octopus and spicy river shrimp. Eventually I would lose focus and the idea of disciplined taste testing would break down completely. I stand or rather sit by decision though. Hands down Pescado Capitalies.
I managed to get out to the ruins of Pachacamac, which is the closest archeological site to the city. Pachacamac dates back to 200 AD, well over a thousand years before the Incan Empire. It was basically a religious center devoted to venerating the “creator-god” known as Pacha Kamaq. It was comprised of temples and pyramids. The only residents were the priests and the young virgins. I know what you are thinking – ‘this is a bad combination’ but this was not Catholicism and anyway the virgins happened to be girls. The House of the Chosen where the sacrificial virgins lived has been well excavated and part reconstructed. Interestingly enough the girls who were chosen from the most prominent families remained in the house until age 16 at which point they would decide to commit to the consecration or else wonder back home somewhat disgraced. The Templo Del Sol was an impressive part of the site offering sweeping views of the Pacific from the top. Unfortunately the entire site suffered major damage during the last earthquake and funding of the excavation has long since stopped.
Thursday I headed down the south coast to the city of Nazca. The drive down was a sobering view of the wake left behind by the 8.0 earthquake that struck three weeks ago. Villages with block after block of rock after rock. Everywhere were the remains of structures that were systematically dismantled during two plus minutes of seismic activity. Homes that looked as if they were buzz- sawed down the middle with billowing plastic now covering exposed sections of the home. There were the occasional civil service tents the government had handed out as interim shelter but these were far and few between. I had the suspicion that you hqe to be a perwon or inrluence to be the lucky recipient of one of these tents. It hurt to look out the window. Having experienced the Northridge quake of 1994 which was a 6.7 on the Richter Scale that lasted less than 15 seconds I simply couldn’t even entertain what an 8.0 which lasted over 2 minutes must be like. This quake was more than 30 times as powerful. Entertaining the thought of experiencing such magnitude and duration of force just blows the mind.
There were elements of the drive that stood in contrast to the destruction though. Around Ica where hundreds of oasises dotting the parched earth. It was also interesting that in this low land area the desert ended where the Pacific Ocean began.
After nearly 7 hours we arrived in Nazca. “The Lines” are what Nazca is known for. These are hundreds of geoglyphs that exist out in the middle of the desert. The original crop circles. They include everything from a monkey, an astronaut, a spider, a pair of hands and a condor. They are of an unknown origin with as many theories and plausible dates as there are lines. The theories range anything from a plea to the Sun God during a protracted period of drought to contact with the extraterrestrial, take your pick. The lines themselves were only discovered in the 1940s at the beginning of commercial flight over the area. The geoglyphs can only be seen from above. They are truly spectacular. The over-flights only take place between 8:00 and 10:00AM due to flying conditions. So at 9:00 we squeezed into single-engine 6 seat Cessna and climbed up to 3,000 feet for some of the best window gazing to be had on the continent. It was a 40-minute flight, which consisted of a level fly-over followed by a sharp tuck to the left and then right for equal viewing on both sides of the aircraft. It was an archeological roller coaster ride that made me appreciate skipping my breakfast. I was equally excited by the etchings in the dessert floor below as I was by the constant twisting and turning of the light aircraft. We all sat wearing headphones over which the pilot would make announcements such as “we are now in the whale”, “we are over the monkey” and “we are approaching the astronaut” all of which lent a surreal quality to the whole thing. Before I knew it and certainly before I had found the right settings on my camera we were back down on the ground. Such a good way to the start the day.
For more information and some pics you can look HERE
Oliver is flying in tonight from LA and we are off to Cuzco and then Bolivia on Monday. I will keep you posted.
Thank you to the person who posted the picture without a watermark that appears at the top of this post. Whomever you are, you take a mean picture. My consumer camera was rendered useless.
C.
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