Nasca (or Nazca)

Once again, we found ourselves waiting curbside in the predawn hours for our trusty taxi driver to arrive and get us to the Paracas depot. Better late than never, by the time we pulled up in back of the waiting giant orange and yellow Cruz del Sur bus, my thoughts were already on the four hour bus ride ahead to Nasca and the desertscape with its brownish folds that lay before us.

Two hundred and fifty miles south of Lima, the Nasca lines, giant animal figures and mysterious geometric lines are indelibly carved in the Pampa de San Jose desert. An area of nearly 390 square miles reveals at least 10,000 lines and 300 different figures. Somewhere between 300 and 700 A.D. these lines or geoglyphs were created. A hummingbird, spider, condor, dog, whale and monkey, as well as an anthropomorphic figure with hand raised in greeting to the skies, and which has come to be known as “the astronaut,” welcome the airborne traveler. A sufficient number of warnings on the Internet convinced us to eschew the small plane dip-and-dive choice over the ruins. It’s available to the more intrepidly curious but other limited on-ground sightings are recommended for the queasy stomach types.

Emerging from the bus station into a dry bright noon, we enjoyed walking the few blocks to our Nazca House lodgings, our roll-on baggage in tow. What we found was more a B&B establishment, with three beds sporting dainty ruffled bedcovers crammed into a small second floor room. Nancy, a tiny, thin-boned Peruvian woman, greeted us warmly while her younger brother Carlos hauled our bags upstairs. With a map of the town in hand, we said our temporary farewells and headed out on Avenida Maria Reiche for lunch and local tour shopping.

Nasca is a sprawling town, with door-to-door eating establishments to pretty much satisfy tastes for almost every age. We couldn’t pass up La Taberna, which offered a simple menu with salads and pasta, but offered up graffiti scrawlings from the four corners of the globe. As Nasca is laid out on a simple grid structure, streets are easy to identify and made our walks around center city all the more enjoyable.

Travel agencies in downtown Nasca are as plentiful as eating establishments, and if that isn’t enough to whet the curiosity-seeker’s palate, giant paintings of Maria Reiche were splayed across a series of walls only a couple of blocks from our B&B. Known as the “Dame of the Desert,” Ms. Reiche (1903-1998) was a German-born mathematician who was convinced that the lines were a vast astronomical calendar for the Nascan people. She devoted over 50 years to studying and preserving the lines, measuring, mapping and persuading the Peruvian Air Force to take countless aerial photographs. As part of our after-lunch tour, we visited the spare desert home which serves as a museum for her maps and other paraphernalia related to her lifelong mission. Wandering through the backyard garden where she is buried, I was reminded of another solitary figure, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, whose love of the American Southwest inspired her to create her greatest works.

Also on the agenda was a lookout tower alongside the Pan-American Highway that serves as the main artery through this region. It was a bit of a climb to the top and the precipitous stairwell is not for vertigo sufferers or the kindergarten set (a particularly rambunctious little tourist, ill-supervised by her parents, stumbled on the steps more than once and set our hearts racing). The observable geoglyphs were, however, worth the climb. A tree with sprawling branches was the most clearly delineated but two gigantic hands, one with four pudgy fingers and the other with five, were the more puzzling of the images. Another sighting down the road after a rigorous climb up the nearby hills revealed a huge spiral and a cross-hatching of lines which seemed to suggest some sort of weaving activity. I had to keep reminding myself these weren’t just ambitious etchings in the sand done days before our arrival.

What do these drawings tell us? Theories abound, some religious, some ceremonial, and perhaps the most intriguing of all is the most implausible — or is it? The size and scope of these geoglyphs suggest an extra-terrestrial airfield, a way of signaling welcome to visitors from another world. We were sufficiently intrigued by the lines to visit Hotel Alegria that same evening. A popular downtown hotel reminiscent of a Spanish hacienda, it was offering a documentary film on the geoglyphs and a view of the night skies through a local professor’s telescope. It was a clear, star-filled evening and I had a bird’s eye view of the moon’s craters and Joanne got a glimpse of the rings of Saturn.

The following day, after a solid breakfast of eggs, toast and a rich avocado and fruit salad served by our host Carlos, we signed up for a tour of the area’s well-preserved stone aqueducts. Built by the Nascas to irrigate their bone-dry fields, three dozen in all — some of them remain amazingly still active. We were encouraged by our guide to descend into these spiral-shaped wells and taste the clear water at the bottom. (I let Joanne do the tasting, while I photographed the event.) The same guide demonstrated for us the powdery white cochinilla fungus covering the nearby cacti. Rubbing it in his palm, this substance turned the brilliant red color often used in dying many of the beautiful alpaca fabrics seen throughout the country. Growing cacti specifically for this purpose has become today a profitable industry for some.

The most haunting stop on our tour — one we were totally unprepared to encounter — were the Cementerios de Chauchilla. These are no ordinary cemeteries but a vast necropolis dating back to the Chincha-Inca period (1000-1400 A.D.), with underground tombs exposed to our unbelieving eyes. Though grave-robbers removed the obvious treasures upon their discovery, the mummified remains of adults and children have been left for visitors’ inspection, some in fetal position to exit the world as they entered it. As one moves from tomb to tomb, the desert floor is strewn with stray bone fragments and swaths of cloth that blow indiscriminately in the hot silent breezes. It was and remains a chilling experience.

Returning to Nazca House, we collected our bags and taxied to our Cruz del Sur station. What lay ahead was an overnight journey to Arequipa, aptly named La Ciudad Blanca (the white city) for its porous volcanic stone structures. After a short while, the video screen monitor above our heads was shut off and the twinkling of village lights outside our bus window was no longer visible. How white would the white city be, I wondered.

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