dave bushe dot net

Hammer strikes the metal and it makes me believe

12:27 am Thursday, 6 November, 2008

Alright so, backing up! After Pisco and the Huacachina oasis, (posts to follow, it’s saved on my laptop) we reached Nazca.

First up, if you don’t know what the Nazca Lines are, please go and take a read of this Wikipedia entry.

So we are all up early in the morning to find out our flight order for the day. Handily I’m not on one of the first flights and so it’s back to the hotel for breakfast. A short time before my flight we have a bus transfer to the airport. It’s tiny and there are dozens of small 3-5 seater planes coming and going. On my flight will be Connor (from Tipperary) and his Czech (via Limerick) girlfriend; Andrea. We are hanging around waiting to be called and we see the first of our group coming back from their flights…and they look like shit. Most are white, there is no colour left in them and several have been throwing up. This is somewhat worrying.

Anyway we get called and we move out to our plane. There’s a random Spanish couple with us, they take the back two seats. Conor and Andrea are in the middle and I’ve got the front seat (it’s about the only place I’ll fit!). So our pilot gives a quick rundown of the order that he’ll fly us over the Lines and we take off. The take-off is lovely and it puts alot of my bad feelings to rest. We climb a little and we take a cruise over the first two Lines and they are just amazing. It’s breathtaking stuff. I’ve got a decent view ahead and a pretty good view to the side so I’m all good. The pilot won’t go onto the next set until everyone has acknowledged that they’ve seen it and taken some photos, which is of course a good thing.

Or is it?

Our pilot happily announces that now we’ll go left so the left side can get a good look. Now it’s all become clear. For the next 30 minutes or so as we fly over all of the Lines, our pilot happily announces “bank left” “now right” and boom it’s no pleasure flight any longer. He fairly throws the plane around the place and happily (are you sensing a trend here?) when I grab the dashboard on the first bank takes both his hands off to slap me away while laughing at me. Nice.

Anyway this goes on and we see some amazing sights, it’s truly breathtaking but it’s tough going as the plane is really all over the place. There are times when people are telling him okay okay I’ve seen it, when they plainly hadn’t and just wanted to go on. Now luckily I wasn’t feeling too bad, I was very flushed and if it had been longer my stomach may have sent my breakfast back but it was okay. If I pushed myself up in my seat I could hit a rush of cold air coming in from the front and I could feel better almost instantly. This was possibly my saving grace. I did have a sick bag handy but I kept it as a souvenir as it had a map of the Lines on it.

Now perhaps you have read this and you think it’s not so bad, you know some banking in a small plane designed for this with a pilot who does it 5 or 6 times a day. Well let me tell you this.
So pilot on the plane, obviously fine. Myself in the front, doing okay. A bit unsteady lets say but doing okay. Connor behind the pilot, a little white and a little unsteady but mainly doing okay. Andrea beside him, the poor thing, has been throwing up for most of the flight and isn’t doing so well. The Spanish couple in the back seat. Well, thankfully I didn’t know this (and there was no effect on anyone else!) until I saw them after the flight but not only was the woman throwing up from the getgo but and how should I phrase this delicately…she not only pissed herself, she shat herself (literally)….and her partner threw up on top of her.

So there ya go, does that give you an idea of the flight?

Having said all that, I loved it and I’d do it again. The flight cost $75 and there were no slots available that afternoon or I would have gone again. It’s one of those things where you think it’d be pretty cool to fly over and to see the Nazca Lines and then you do it and they are just as amazing as you hope and perhaps even more so. So I’ll take some bad feelings for a little while and well I think that a sense of wonder is often enough to balance out a whole load of bad feelings.

I did struggle a bit with experience vs. taking photos, as you may have seen I have posted a few and I do have more to come but that’s down the line a bit.

Right so that afternoon I took a tour out to the Chauchilla cemetery having read that it was a “must see”. What it actually is, as it turns out, is a mass grave. There are some tombs but it’s ground littered with bones and cloth. Due to the climate, hot and dry there are a number of mummy’s throughout the few tombs and they are in remarkable condition many still with skin and hair. However the entire thing just pisses me off. Being there made me uncomfortable. Okay, walking on a mass grave is not a nice experience but this was a graveyard and not like the Killing Fields in Cambodia but still it’s pretty disrespectful to just be walking across people huh?

Having said that, the thing that got to me the most was the way it was organised. So you go there to see a Pre-Inca cemetery and there are all these mummy’s and tombs and there’s no order to anything. There’s no care taken to preserve anything, we are walking along a path which they *know* is over more tombs and even more so they know we are damaging these tombs as they have found a number of mummy’s (should that be mummies?) which have been crushed because of people walking on this path above them. Worse than that, if (and indeed when) the tour guides or tourists find pieces of a body (and that’s pretty easy), they simply pick it up and throw it into the nearest tomb. Our guide was proudly pointing out the hand, food and indeed mummy of a child she had found a couple of weeks ago and they had simply been thrown into the nearest grave.

So not only are you walking over these people and causing damage to the ruins but you don’t actually gain anything out of it, there is fuck all historic value there, it’s just a hodgepodge throw together. The whole thing really annoyed me. I’m not explaining it so well but that’s all I got. It was all just wrong.

Right, moving along. That night we headed to dinner in Nazca which was really nice and a few beers went down well. They we took an overnight bus to somewhere else Arequipa, an old colonial town. It’s beautiful. It’s really lovely. We take a quick walking tour and it’s all just beautiful. Small back streets, open squares and gorgeous buildings. Along the way on the walking tour I spot an Irish pub and it has a sign outside claiming it has Guinness! So after the tour I figure I’ve found my spot for lunch and that I’ll manage a pint and so get Peru out of the way. I wander in and order my food and a Guinness. “No Guinness, Corona Senior?” Suffice it to say I left pretty quickly and had a pizza next door!

After that I did the Santa Catalina Convent (Wikipedia) which was kinda nice and I took a few photos but fucking hell the church did a number on this country/continent and I could really do without all the shite.

Now that night we did a group dinner in a posh restaurant (dinner and drinks was about a tenner). We went there, ZigZag if I recall correctly, because they do a type of stonegrill where they bring out a beef steak, an ostrich steak and an alpaca steak. I was not sold on the ostrich, mine was maybe a medium at best and it was pretty fatty, the alpaca on the otherhand was possibly the nicest steak I’ve ever had. It was perfect in every way. I very very much enjoyed the whole meal and I’ve had alpaca several times since, it’s good meat!

We had a couple of new people join us at this point, Barbara and Alex a pair of Aussies on their honeymoon. So they ended up in a bar nextdoor with Connor and Andrea and Gemma and myself. We had a few drinks and a good chat and were just about to leave around 11.30 when a local covers band came on and so of course we had another drink or two. Our requests for U2 in very broken Spanish were not met and we gave up around 1.00. It was a good night though.

The next day we headed to an overnight in the Colca Canyon. This is a good bit away and involves a long bus ride high up through the Andes including a pass at just under 5000 metres. Altitude is interesting and more on that in a bit. The bus ride is interesting enough I guess and eventually we arrive in Chivay where we do a little walk and spend the night. The next morning we head to Condor Crossing to try and see some condors. We fail, of course, but do spot one form the bus back. Now the Colca Canyon is technically the deepest in the world as apparently you measure from the tip of the highest peak. It seems a bit like cheating and it’s not all that impressive but we do another bit of a walk and it’s good to be doing something at altitude to prepare for the Inca Trail.

Then we do the same bus ride back to Arequipa and spend another night there before it’s onto Cuzco.

So lets pause there. That gets me a good bit up to date on where I’ve been. So some things.

Altitude. It’s odd and I’ll cover it more in the next few posts. The immediate effect it had on me was fucked up dreams. As soon as we started staying up high I started having the strangest, most vivid dreams I can recall having. Odd stuff.

People, I might come back and cover this later on. The tour is odd, very odd in places and as it’s a combination of tours and was somewhat established/clique when I joined (more so than I’d seen before) and so it’s odd. It didn’t help that Maree, Andrea and Connor were only with us for a couple of weeks and so are already gone onwards. It’s not turned out so bad but it’s still odd. Enough of that though. Actually one more thing, the age group is mainly good. There are a few of us late 20s and that’s been good.

We have gained a couple and we loose a few this weekend so more along the line.

I’m on such a massive Ryan Adams kick at the moment but again more on that later (see Inca Trail to follow).

Oh yes. Postage in Peru is hugely expensive, stamps for a postcard are more than a pound so sorry to say that I’ve not sent anything from here! That also means that a couple of birthday presents are going to be late too.

I took to writing in my notebook there a few days ago. There was a couple of reasons for it. First the lack of my laptop is really getting to me. I’m missing so much by not being able to type things up as I go along. Right now I have a typically rude French couple who each have a computer on one side of me and think nothing of carrying on a conversation over me. I hate internet cafes. With a lot of luck it won’t be much longer but it’s really getting to me. Anyway the second reason was that I had something I wanted to work through and it couldn’t wait.

It was very interesting to read through some of the notes that I wrote out back in January this year and to find them matching up so closely to ongoing oncerns about what I do write up here.

Tonight is my last night in Peru and so there’ll be a beer or two somewhere and then tomorrow to Bolivia. A long enough old day but then it’s a couple of days off. The plan is to bike 64km on “The Most Dangerous Road In The World” aka “Death Road” (Wikipedia) on Friday and follow this by getting utterly trashed as there are no wake up calls on Saturday and we have not had a full on night out yet. The new Bond is out tomorrow in Bolivia and so we reckon that it’ll be perfect for hangover fodder on Saturday.

Finally, 349 to 162, well done America!

19.22 Puno, Peru. Wednesday November 5th.