16: darkest Peru

When I arrived in Lima, the first thing that struck me was the strange fog that covered the city. Over the winter months, a thick grey mist hangs over everything at a low level, making it feel like its shrouded in a sort of dirty cotton wool. I had a day to kill before Amy arrived, so I took a walk down to see the travel agent to sort out our trip to Nazca.

Wandering round the quiet suburbs of Miraflores, I can't quite explain the the peculiar sense of affinity I felt with Lima. This was where I came from, 30 years ago, and the streets oddly reminded me of places I had visited and lived in with my family years before: I almost kept expecting my Mum to appear from round a corner, waiting to meet me in some shop or restaurant. I walked down to the coast and took the cliff path toward the centre of Miraflores. The sea was full of hundreds of surfers (the water must have been freezing) and gliders were climbing into bodysocks and jumping off the edge of the cliff into the circular air currents swirling about above the path. I headed back toward the hotel via the Artisan market. Not having bought anything up until this point I wasn't keen to fill my already full backpack with too many bits before the last few bits of travel we had ahead of us, but it was worth a look - full of beautiful alpaca products, silver jewellery and intricately carved gourds.

over the Panamerican highway

After picking Amy up from the airport, the next morning we had a quick look round the market and stuffed ourselves with empanadas before getting a taxi to the Cruz del Sur depot for the bus to Nazca. The landscape was totally different from what I had been used to: dusty roads, barren mountains and desert plains. Nazca was a bit of a dump, but the sites we had gone there to visit were worth it.

After waiting ages at the aerodrome to see the Nazca Lines, we took off in a four seater cessna. The little plane bounced along the tarmac in a way I can only describe as rather like a heavy bumblebee taking off from a fruit cake and we were in the air, soaring over incredible desert mountains. We wore headphones but they seemed more to protects our ears from the noise than for communication, as every now and then the assistant pilot would turn to us, point at his map and shout "monkey!", at which point the plane would turn sideways and the windows would face the ground in order for us to see and try and take pictures.

the spider

The Nazca Lines are weird. They were discovered when the American professor, studying from the air what he thought were remnants of ancient irrigation, saw the tracing of a huge hummingbird measuring 110m in length. In 1946 a German mathematician-turned-archeologist called Maria Reiche began studying them, an occupation which would take up the rest of her life. My parents lived in Peru in the 70s and recalled meeting her when visiting Nazca: they said she was "...strange".  There are hundreds of huge shapes and figures marked in the desert, from straight lines to a monkey, a spider and a whale amongst others. Maria decided that the lines were astronomical; they centred on the summer and winter solstice and pointed to the horizon in line where the sun and stars were at particular and important times of the year.

Being in a small plane is much like being in a small boat for me, so it wasn't really a surprise when I had to stop trying to take photos, and after the final lurching turn to see the last figure, I had to be sick. Amy tried very hard to ignore this, but no one could miss the telltale signs of her tapping her mouth repeatedly as she said to herself: "don't be sick, don't be sick". I prayed no one else would chuck.

visitors approaching from the desert

We headed from the aerodrome to Chauchilla cemetery, discovered in the 1920s and over 1,000 years old. It was a peculiar place, stretched out on a flat piece of desert with a small one-roomed building serving as a museum. Rows of stones have been laid out to denote a path, and simple straw huts on wooden stick have been erected over the burial areas. The graves are open, and many of the human remains still show skin and hair. Our tour guide told us that archeologists come back occasionally to clean and preserve the remains, but other than that very little study has been undertaken, no DNA analysis; they don't even know whether these remains are male or female. The weirdest thing about the place, and it's something I only noticed halfway through the visit, is that the remains are not just contained to the grave pits. Years ago the cemetery was plundered by grave robbers looking for valuables, and they literally ripped the remains apart. Tiny fragments of bone litter the sand, so small that at first your eyes take them in as part of the natural bleached colour of the sand. But when you look closely, you see bone in every square foot of the ground; some just tiny shards, some rather larger.

As we got back into the car, the air grew thicker and eventually the sky disappeared under a cloud of sand. We had dinner at the hotel Maria Reiche used to stay in and visited her planetarium to hear about the astronomical theory behind the lines. At the end of the lecture we were invited to look through their high powered telescope to look at jupiter and the moon.