Latinalicious: The South America Diaries

by Becky Wicks

  Anyway, the Nazca Lines. They were a bit smaller than I’d imagined, for some reason. I guess the perspective was a bit off from so high up. They’re actually spread over 500 kilometres and the largest figures stretch almost 270 metres. I didn’t get any good photos ’cause I wanted to puke every time we circled, but either way, paying $95 for the twenty-one minute experience was worth it.

  Soaring over these mysterious lines took my breath away. This was only really because the plane kept jostling up and down and doing loops round each pattern, so all four of us passengers could see them. At one point the plane’s sick bag wouldn’t stop taunting me:

  ‘You’re gonna have to use me.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Yes you are. You’re feeling it. Did you feel that bump? You’re gonna have to use me.’

  ‘No I’m NOT. Fuck off.’

  I didn’t have to use it in the end. But it was a close call.

  I’d first seen the Nazca Lines in a documentary when I was a kid and I’ve been fascinated ever since. They were, after all, like Machu Picchu, created with the assistance of extraterrestrials.

  Of course, there are other theories, too. If you haven’t ever seen the Nazca Lines, have a little Google, but basically, set quite clearly into the sands and preserved almost completely by the flat, dry, windless desert plateaus are a series of ancient geoglyphs supposedly created between 400 and 650 A.D. They were discovered by a hiker in 1927, although it was an historian studying ancient irrigation systems in the 1940s who flew over them in a plane and realised that the strange lines and symbols converged at the winter solstice (when the sun is at its lowest altitude above the horizon). I can’t even imagine the concentration and time it must have taken for the Nazcas to get that positioning right. Did they move stuff about on every solstice?

  ‘Not there … not there … nope, not there … not there … nope, not there, not there … nope, not there. Forget it, let’s try next time.’ Until one year, ‘THERE! Yes, there. That’s the ticket, guys! Lovely work. Only took 200 years. Shall we grab some corn and potatoes and celebrate by painting some pots?’

  It’s crazy when you think that these people had none of the measuring tools we have today. Wooden stakes have been found in the region, which may have been the tools used to create the shallow trenches in the ground that constitute the lines, yet the accuracy and intricacy of hummingbirds, a giant spider, a monkey with a spiraled tail, a cartoon-like whale, a flower and a tree — even what looks like an astronaut on the side of a hill — is unbelievable when you see the scale of them.

  Some people believe the lines have a religious purpose, although I stand by the alien visitation theory. It’s the only one that makes sense to me. Erich von Däniken, a popular Swiss author, maintains that all the Nazca Lines are actually runways in an ancient airfield once populated by extraterrestrials, who the Nazcas mistook for their gods. Several patterns, I swear, really do look just like the outline of a small airfield. You can almost make out a landing strip and spirals shaped suspiciously like landing pads, all etched into the dirt like a blueprint among the pictures of animals. It’s creepy. The officials don’t agree and don’t encourage von Däniken’s ramblings but we’ll never know anything for certain, so personally I say why not make the sci-fi nerds among us happy and just go with it? Some people are so boring.

  Anyway, I’m glad I got to see them after all this time, even if they were more exciting in the documentary.

  Seeing as Janice and Bill left for Lima this morning and I was faced with a day alone, I booked a tour to the Chauchilla Cemetery, just out of town. It wasn’t the ideal birthday outing, turning thirty-three surrounded by withering corpses, but it was better than sitting around in the empty resort with no friends, waiting for the bored pool man to turn the water feature on.

  Chauchilla Cemetery is the only archaeological site in Peru where ancient mummies can be seen in their original graves. The site, dating back to 200 A.D but only discovered in the 1920s, was looted by treasure hunters who took the valuable stuff and left behind the bones of those long dead. They left a lot of pots, too, of course. And bits of pots. I suppose there are only so many pots one knows what to do with, really. Even the tomb raiders were probably sick of them: ‘Not another fucking POT. I don’t care what it’s worth. Leave it there.’

  It was pretty cool to see the place in its lonely stretch of desert nothingness, with the mummies returned to their original tombs, exposed to the air, no glass covering over them or anything. These thousand-year-old bodies have been preserved so well by the natural climate that they still have hair on their heads — huge Rasta-like dreadlocks curling around their skeletons, which are a sign apparently that the Nazcas were probably a nation of highly respected priests. Some even have the remains of soft skin tissue in places (mostly on their feet) and coloured clothing still wrapped around them. These people were dyeing clothes, creating some sort of ‘fashion’ 400 years before Christ; they were priests, warriors, architects (they built some nifty aqueducts, which you can also go and see), and excellent metalsmiths who worked with gold from the surrounding hills. They did heaps of cool stuff with next to no tools, those Nazcas.

  Sometimes I think we should change the meaning of BC from Before Christ to Before Computers because, seriously, people got a lot more done before they came along …

  Anyway, so here I am, still alone on my birthday with nothing much else to do in Nazca. At first it was quite thrilling being queen of the hotel but now, having read some more of my ayahuasca book collection, stared at the sky and failed to spot any aliens (again), I’m a bit bored, really. I feel all fidgety and friendless and I’m even considering ordering and eating some guinea-pig, just for something different … although my brother had a guinea-pig when we were kids and every time I almost order some here in Peru I think of skewering and eating poor, trusting Rumpelstiltskin and I feel like a bad person. Plus, they look like boiled squirrels on sticks. I’ll probably just have the chicken cordon-bleu again.

  Had Janice and Bill still been here, of course, we would have swigged some birthday Fanta and talked some more about the severed heads that Bill’s had to evict from various Massachusetts landmarks. That would have been a fun birthday. But as it is, I think I might leave early and take another overnight bus — to Arequipa.

  21/11

  Canyon cock-ups and Arequipa …

  I thought seeing as I’d had rather a lonely birthday I would book myself into the rowdiest hostel I could find as soon as I arrived in Arequipa, the sort frequented by anatomy-exposing Brits and Australians of the calibre I met on the Death Road. I thought we could all get drunk together and maybe a little bit stupid and I would feel young and rejuvenated and alive.

  But on the way to the Wild Rover Arequipa (yes, the place in which the Irish lad soiled his mattress in a drunken stupor is a chain), I gave a taxi driver 100 soles, only for him to ditch me and speed off with my 90 soles change.

  It’s my fault, I suppose, for breaking the traveller’s rule and handing him such a huge bill, but I was tired after eight hours on a bus and didn’t have anything smaller. So that was the equivalent of $40 down the drain — money I was going to use to pay for the hostel, buy drinks and act like a fool with pissed-up backpackers.

  Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something.

  I went to the bar anyway, waited about ten minutes for a drunk bartender in a leopard print coat and sunglasses to break away from the girl he was chatting up and begrudgingly serve me a bottle of water, then went to bed in the dorm, where I lay awake waiting for the pulsating throb of house and trance music to stop echoing through the corridors and into my ears.

  Not to be deterred, the next day I took myself on a walking tour of beautiful Arequipa and signed myself up for the requisite trip to Colca Canyon, a two-day ‘moderate’ hike to the world’s second biggest canyon (and Peru’s third most-visited tourist destination). The brochure made it all look so lovely. It included an overnight stop in an o
asis with a swimming pool, all my meals would be included and the tour company would pick me up at three the next day. Excellent.

  ‘That’s 3 a.m.,’ the young booking agent at the hostel informed me, printing out my voucher dot-by-agonising-dot on the planet’s oldest printer.

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘3 a.m. They will collect you here.’

  ’3 a.m.? That’s not still a real time, is it?’ I stared at her in horror. I’ve not seen 3 a.m., I don’t think, since I was in Buenos Aires, probably because I’ve not really been drinking much, thanks to all these high-altitude pit stops. Funny what a bit of altitude’s done for me, come to think of it. Maybe I should move to a mountaintop permanently. My lungs would struggle but my liver would thrive.

  Anyway, 3 a.m. rolled around and I rolled myself sleepily out of bed just as everyone else in the Wild Rover was rolling into theirs, whereupon I and roughly twelve other people were driven three hours into daylight in a bumpy van. Then, in a dusty village, in what appeared to be someone’s living room, we were fed a ‘buffet’ breakfast of the obligatory tour-sponsored stale bread, some sort of neon pink ham product and some delicious olives.

  The olives in Peru are all delicious, I should say. You can’t get a decent cup of coffee anywhere (where do they send it all!?), but the olives are first rate. In Arequipa I discovered an outstanding restaurant that serves the best olives I’ve ever had. Its main offering is a variety of gourmet crepes filled with yummy stuff (think juicy steak and mushroom, chicken and Roquefort, chicken curry with pineapple, etc), which are all exceptional, but the olives are worth the detour alone. It’s called Crepisimo. Look it up.

  I like Arequipa, by the way. Apart from their thieving taxi drivers, it’s probably my favourite place so far in Peru. It’s dubbed the White City because, unlike the grubby London tube stop of the same name, Arequipa is full of pristinely maintained Spanish colonial architecture, built of sillar, a white stone which was quarried from the surrounding volcanoes. A short walk over the bridge towards a Western-style shopping mall provided humbling views of the towering El Misti volcano, sprinkled with a dusting of snow.

  Arequipa seems spotlessly clean. There are some lovely churches and monasteries to idle around. The shops are modern, including an unsettlingly large array of optical stores, which most Bolivian and Peruvian cities seem to have an abundance of, I’ve noticed; are more people blind or partially sighted here than anywhere else? People seem to obey traffic lights, at any rate, a rarity in these parts and their crepes are magnificent. What’s not to love? It’s the most Westernised city I’ve found myself in for several months, which I’m not ashamed to say makes me deliriously happy.

  What doesn’t make me happy, however, is thinking back to the tour I just took. So, where were we? Oh yes, the trip to Colca Canyon. After breakfast and paying an additional 70 soles each to enter the park, we were driven to see some condors at a lookout point. I’m quite sure the condors weren’t there, although our tour guide, having promised we’d see them, seemed to think we’d think him a great man if he pointed at distant dots in the sky, which were probably finches, and exclaimed, ‘Look, look! Condor!’

  Then, off we set on foot down the canyon, along a winding path with even more terrifying vertical drops from it than the Death Road. It was slippery, too. Everyone’s feet were skidding on the dusty rocks, even in the sturdiest of hiking shoes. I fell over, as did the girl I was walking with, Charlotte. We bonded as we trekked (she was alone, too, as her boyfriend had to leave their three-month trip early because of severe altitude sickness in Bolivia), and both being British we had a good moan about everything. But rightly so, because our knees were in pain — a pain that steadily became more severe the more we walked downhill. It got to the point, after three more hours or so, where neither of us could walk ten metres without stumbling over in sheer agony and exhaustion.

  Just to paint a clearer picture, Colca Canyon is more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. It’s promoted as the world’s deepest canyon at 4160 metres, which you must drop and then ascend. It might sound like a moderate hike when coming from the mouth of a booking agent who wants your money, but in actual fact, when your quads are about to crack, it becomes clear that it’s not for the weak-of-leg or wimp. Personally, I found it infinitely more difficult than the Inca Trail, perhaps because I wasn’t warned or given any hiking poles.

  I will say, though, that although brown and dry, streaked only occasionally with shrubbery or a waterfall — at least until you get to the lush, tropical bottom — Colca Canyon is definitely worth seeing. The perspective it offers to the tiny, insignificant human as the earth gives way to tumbling cliff face is one you know you’ll never forget when you’re standing at the top, listening to an idiot pointing to a finch and shouting, ‘Condor!’

  Most of the time, however, you’re just looking at the ground, trying not to fall over the edge.

  We quickly realised we were also expected to pay for all of our own drinks along the route. This might sound like a silly complaint to you, but these bottles of water we all found ourselves gasping for were four times the price of what they cost in shops, and neither Charlotte’s nor my own booking agent had told us water wasn’t included. On the Inca Trail, they boil water for you as you go, which is free and also helps prevent the trail becoming littered with thousands of plastic bottles.

  In Colca Canyon, there are empty plastic bottles scattered everywhere, along with women in those ubiquitous voluminous skirts all trying their best to sell you overpriced beverages at various pre-arranged stops.

  When it came to lunch, a stop in a surprisingly green and flowery Garden of Eden halfway down, we were fed a meal of typical Peruvian salted beef and rice and still not given a drink. Apparently, boiling a kettle was out of the question, even though there were hosepipes coiling and spitting their abundant natural water supply all over the place. There was also an overflowing bucket of ‘recyclable’ plastic bottles, no doubt waiting to be plodded back up the canyon on the back of a mule, but which, with a bit of planning, could easily be refilled on-site. It was actually depressing.

  Once we finally reached the bottom of the canyon at roughly 5 p.m., weary, aching like never before and dehydrated, we were led to our ramshackle rooms in the equally lush, green Oasis resort, but again, offered no drinks. Nada. Dinner was cheap pasta with chopped tomatoes on top, during which it was explained that we’d have to leave again at 4 a.m. for the three-hour ascent back up to the top.

  ‘Do we have to get up even earlier for breakfast then?’ I asked.

  ‘No, there is no breakfast.’

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘No breakfast until we reach the top of the canyon, then we will walk to the restaurant.’

  ‘No breakfast before a three-hour uphill climb?’ I was stunned.

  ‘You can take a mule, if you like. They are 60 soles.’

  ‘Can we not even have, like, a biscuit or something first?’

  ‘No, sorry. But you can take a mule up, if you like. They are 60 soles.’

  ‘It sounds like you want me to take a mule.’

  ‘Do you want a mule?’

  ‘Do we get coffee first, at least, before the three-hour uphill climb?’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  ‘Then yes, I’ll need a fucking mule, won’t I!’

  Well, Jesus. Honestly.

  When we finally got to the top, my bare legs were all chaffed on the insides from rubbing on the mule’s stirrup straps. I hoped they might surprise us with a buffet breakfast like no other, a veritable banquet of eggs a thousand ways, coffee of the finest Peruvian bean and semi-naked supermodels in diamante g-strings pouring fruit juice from golden flasks. I mean, you’d expect that, right? But what did we get?

  That’s right, more stale bread rolls. Only one each, mind you. When we’d devoured them and asked for more, the grumpy server in the restaurant, bedecked in a grotty, stained jumper, said she didn’t have any. Oh, and could we please stop asking for
coffee sachets too, because we’d used our allocated lot.

  I should say that even my mule had a bit of trouble getting up that canyon, and he had four legs. I don’t know how I would have done it on two, never mind with no caffeine inside me. Had there been no mule, I’d probably still be sitting there, halfway up, motioning people past me with a pathetic wave until someone three weeks later thought to drop a winch from a helicopter. I can barely walk out of a hostel in the morning without a coffee, and they expected me to scrape my way out of a canyon? We were given coffee on the Inca Trail — why not here? I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life.

  I guess the moral of this story is, do a bit of reading before you sign yourself up for something silly, which is something I never seem to do enough of before these trips. It’s my fault for underestimating the steepness of the canyon, of course, and for thinking myself somewhat of an experienced hiker after conquering the Inca Trail (ahem). But it’s also the tour company’s fault for not telling us to bring extra supplies, or even providing hiking poles, which would have taken some of the pressure off our knees and stopped us skidding next to perilous cliff edges. Robbing us every hour for drinks that we’d perish if we didn’t buy didn’t help either.

  When I got back to the Wild Rover, I dragged my aching limbs round the corner to Crepisimo and, over a fine glass of hard-earned Malbec and some more olives, I Googled the hell out of my next stop-but-one, Iquitos. I was determined to do even more research into my upcoming jungle adventures with ayahuasca.

  I came across a blog on the dangers of dodgy plant dealers and, as a result, exchanged a few emails with a lovely British expat called Andy, who regularly takes tourists to see a trusted shaman called Don Lucho. I’m getting the feeling I’ve met my guides for this impending spiritual journey, but, as you can imagine, I’m still reading carefully on the subject. After what just went down, the last thing I need is to under-prepare and end up stranded in the Amazon, being eaten alive, while losing my mind to the ‘spirit of the vine’.