From Huacachina to Nazca, Peru
This post is based on a journal entry originally recorded on May 25, 2008.
We drove on through the desolate outskirts of Ica and stopped at a roadside restaurant in Huacachina, the only natural oasis in the Peruvian desert. There, towering dunes ringed a small green lake, maybe a hundred yards across and ringed with palm trees. Huacachina was developed in the 1940s and was once a popular resort or balneario, but now it looked run-down and rough. I read later that tourists who wandered too far away from the promenade were liable to be robbed in broad daylight by desperate locals. The area immediately around the lake seemed safe enough and was overrun by young families and couples on honeymoon. Aside from the water, Huacachina was known as a place for “extreme sports”. High up on the dunes we saw groups of tourists sandboarding (sliding down the hills on small modified surfboards) and tearing up and down in dune buggies. Pati asked if we wanted to do any of these things, but no one was interested.
Inside the roadhouse we sat down at a long table to eat lunch. I had chicken soup, served with lime wedges and hot rocoto pepper sauce, and seco, a beef and carrot stew with a side rice and beans. The soup was simple and delicious; strong broth, tender chicken that fell off the bone at the touch of a spoon, a whole hard-boiled egg and spaghetti noodles. The seco was equally tasty, and the beans reminded me of the Mexican home cooking my grandmother used to make.
While we were eating, a tour bus full of of British and Americans arrived. A man with a guitar turned up out of nowhere and began wandering among the tables, playing for tips. He started with Andean music like “El Cóndor Pasa”, but soon moved into more familiar tunes like “La Bamba” and “Canción del Mariachi” (the last one with new Peruvian lyrics). There was a brief fracas when an American woman somehow locked herself in the bathroom. Eventually half a dozen people were involved, and someone shimmied up a ladder and over the stall door to set her free.
After lunch we went for a walk around the oasis. Kids posed for pictures next to a bare-breasted mermaid with brightly-painted nipples. She was the mythical creator of Huacachina. According to legend, a local princess came to a valley to cry for her dead lover, an Incan soldier. She cried so long and so hard that her tears filled the valley and formed an oasis, and for some reason she turned into a mermaid. Along the promenade, shops and stalls sold jewelry and various souvenirs: painted rocks, wooden carvings, alpaca garments, and weavings. Jiri bought a large wooden carving and Alena bartered for a mask. I looked at some necklaces for Michelle, but didn’t see anything I liked, and we got back into the van and drove on.
As we got closer to Nazca, we began to enter the foothills of the Andes. Late in the afternoon we went up and down our first set of switchbacks. The contrast was clear and stark between dry, crumbling hills the color of milky coffee and glittering with minerals, and the fertile green valleys below. Every bit of watered bottomland was fields, and houses were built on the scruffy margins between mountain and valley. Close to Nazca, we pulled off next to a metal tower in the middle of rocky plain. This was the mirador, a viewing platform that one could climb for the price of one sol and see the edge of the Nazca lines.
The lines are ancient, mysterious, and justifiably famous. Hundreds of thousands of straight lines, geometric shapes, and animal or anthropomorphic figures stretch from one end of the valley floor to the other, covering several hundred square kilometers. There are any number of crazy explanations for why the Nazca lines were built: they were landing strips for ancient spacecraft; they were signals to travellers from above; they were some kind of futuristic observatory that required flying machines to create and see. The sane explanation is that the lines were pathways to and from ceremonial centers and sources of water. Nazca lies smack in the middle of one of the driest parts of South America, and knowing where to find water on a daily basis would have been the difference between life and death. Many of the lines run perpendicular to the Río Ingenio, the main source of water in the region. The animal figures were probably meant to be walked as part of water-finding rituals, and may have also been the totems of local settlements.
The Nazca lines are famous largely due to the work of Maria Reiche, a German mathematician who began studying the lines in the 1930s. Twenty years earlier, pilots flying over southern Peru for the first time began to notice that the ditches criss-crossing the Pampa de Nazca formed patterns. Maria Reiche made it her job to map and clean the lines, often camping out in the featureless plain for days at a time. She thought that the lines were a giant astronomical calculator, used to mark the dates of solstices. Whether or not she was right, Reiche is beloved in Nazca. Her work put Nazca on the map, and now the town survives almost entirely on tourism.
From the mirador I could see three figures: “The Hands”, two outstretched palms connected to a headless barrel chest, “The Tree”, representing a trunk and deep root system, and part of “The Lizard”, a large figure that was obliterated by the construction of the Panamerican Highway. We marveled for a bit, getting our sol’s worth, and then climbed down and drove on into Nazca, a nondescript little city strung along the bottom of a river valley.
It was already dusk when we arrived at our stop for the night, Hotel Majoró. The hotel was a beautiful old estacionamiento or ranch, surrounded by a high stone wall with a heavy wooden gate. Inside were lush gardens, beautiful tiled courtyards, a pool, a pond with a fountain and a small island (which had its own trees and hammocks), bars, sitting areas, and any number of other amenities. It was stunning. My room was small but clean, with a marble-tiled bathroom and a deep tub. It was past dinnertime, but I wasn’t very hungry, so I went for a walk. Behind the main salon (another beautiful space with plush chairs, antique textiles and reproduction pottery in the ancient style), I found a garden full of exotic flowers and a path marked “Planetarium →” leading off into the dark.
As I was walking across the lawn, I heard the breathing of a large animal and glimpsed a dark shape on the tennis court in front of me. I froze, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw that it was a llama or alpaca. It stared at me, its eyes narrow and its ears flattened against its head in a posture of defense. I had never been so close to a llama outside of the zoo, and I didn’t know how it would react to me trying to pass. I watched it for a minute, then walked back the way I came. In the salon, Suzanne was watching a movie about Truman Capote. I watched it on and off for a bit and wrote in my journal. The movie ended, and I went back to my room, where I took a hot bath, read, and went to sleep.
