Nazca via inane Ica

Author’s note: ‘Nazca via inane Ica’ is the fifth chapter of my book ‘From dementia to adventure, which explains my reasons for travelling to Peru in 2001. You can also read the first chapter, Dementing in London, take a look at the full index of chapters or dive straight into the jungle chapter called By boat to Iquitos.

Did you miss the previous chapter?

After goodbyes with the young ticket touts, and of course Monica and Albert, I set off for the small bus depot in Pisco. Two other Londoners are waiting for the Nazca bus and it’s nice to meet up with someone from home. We sit together on the bus and enjoy having a chat about the wonders and disasters of travelling. The main stop-off point on the road to Nazca is a few hours down the road at Ica. Our bus stops here for a break and to let off two Germans who are going off to try sandboarding.

We re-board after a short spell for water and a fifty centimos toilet experience that wasn’t too painful. Taking our seats it’s clear our bus is filling rapidly and still more locals with their cloth bundled belongings are queuing to get on the bus. All seats have been taken in an increasingly stressful atmosphere and we realise that the twenty or so locals in the aisle and the ten or so outside will not get their ride this journey. Something has to give. It is after much frenzied Peruvian conversations with the driver and angry faced locals pointing at the gringos that the driver fights his way to us.

“Do you have tickets?”

“Yes, of course,” we all answer in unison and fumble in our pockets to produce the sacred scrolls.

“Here you are” and in turn, we give our tickets for examination by the driver and any other Peruvian who can see over his shoulder. It’s getting hot.

“You do not have a seat number,” he says defiantly and the Peruvians waiting next to him smile in the way that winners do. Almost immediately tickets emerge from out of nowhere all with seat numbers on. Our seat numbers.

“You have to get off the bus.”

“But how do we get to Nazca?”

“Another bus will take you to Nazca” and almost by arrangement a bus pulls up on our left close to our bus and the crowd all points at it.

“There, there is your bus.” We know we are beaten, get up and struggle our way off the bus. I briefly wonder how only the gringos don’t have seat numbers printed on their tickets. The chaotic bureaucracy of ticket allocation and sales are a bizarre thing as more tickets have been sold than there are seats. However, we appear to be in luck as the next bus is a lot less cramped and even appears cleaner. Our driver escorts us off the bus, just to make sure.

“Can we have our backpacks?” We all ask looking at the small gap between the two buses and the hold door at the end of our bus.

“They will go to Nazca and they will be there when you arrive.” It doesn’t take too much sense to work out that this is a bad idea and we can all kiss our backpacks goodbye if they stay in that hold. I translate what the driver has said to my London friends and panic hits them in the face and suddenly I find myself as our spokesperson.

“We need our backpacks.”

“Just get on the bus.”

“Not without our backpacks.” There is a nice sized crowd developing now and even a few who had struggled onto the bus have come off to find out what is going on and no doubt to find out why their bus hasn’t left. With the sweat now pouring from my brow the angry driver and I continue our verbal tennis.

“We cannot leave without our backpacks!”

“Just get on the bus!” he shouts almost as his final word on the matter. I turn to my friends.

“Well, what did he say?” they ask hopefully.

“He wants us to leave without our bags” and with that, I stride over to the hold door that separates us from our bags. It’s unlocked but the gap between the two buses is too small to open the door fully so there is nothing for it but to squeeze into the sauna-like dark space to retrieve our bags before the driver has a chance to pull away. It’s funny how you can all pull together in a crisis and somehow we instantly know what to do. I fumble in the smelly hold and shout out for colours.

“Mine’s blue” shouts one of the Londoners.

“Blue, right, next one” I shout as I throw out the backpack to be caught by the first Londoner and is passed on to the next, like people standing in line at a fire, passing buckets of water down a long chain.

“Mine’s red” the other Londoner shouts as I scout the hold for the red one, this is then ejected and I find my own and escape. The bus pulls away and we stand and hug each other with our backpacks doing likewise on the floor. We are slightly reluctant to let our bags out of our sight but do agree for them to go in the hold of the new bus. We all take our seats and try to calm down. We start to giggle about the whole event to release some of the tension as one of the drunken locals sitting in front of us starts up a conversation.

“Where are you from?”

“England,” I say still holding the fort.

“England…” he goes into some deep drunken thought.

“…England is very…warlike.” After some thought of my own, I agree with him and smile to myself. It is only on reaching Nazca some hours later that I realise that I have left my only jumper, my brother’s — it costs fifty quid do not lose it — jumper, on the previous bus. Bugger.

My cool lads in Pisco had set me up with a package of trips including flying over the Nazca Lines in a bi-plane and staying in a flash hotel in town. They assured me that a driver would meet the bus. I wonder if he will be here after the confusion of the bus swap at Ica. But he is, I am saying goodbye to my fellow Londoners when this guy approaches me and I am off as I overhear the Londoners talking.

“Who is he going with?”

“I think he’s been here before, they must know each other.” Well perhaps in another life but I am just as new to the place as they are. Again I place my trust in a stranger and I am off in his car to the swish Hotel Mirador. Complete with ensuite shower I am pleased to see my comfortable room, especially after the strict manager couldn’t see my name on the booking list.

I take myself out to a local restaurant for a three Soles dinner where the tablecloths are red chequered plastic. Lomo Saltado por favor is turning out to be my favourite Spanish phrase. I sit and eat my piping hot dinner with chips that could have done with a few more minutes in the pan and relax with a rabid dog sitting on my feet waiting patiently for scraps. I have heard of Peruvian’s giving a little food and drink from each meal to mother Earth so I figure that it would probably be rude not to give him something. For once everyone’s attention is not transfixed on me but another source of entertainment. The TV. World Wide Wrestling is playing and the old boy and his son give me fleeting glances as they sit open-mouthed at the action on the little box. Even the little boy who has followed me down the street has decided that watching the wrestling is better than watching me and I finish my meal in peace and give my compliments to the cook who gives me a warm toothy grin.

All these day trips start so damn early. Seven a.m. and I am in the main square (yes another one) eating bananas and watching the locals jostling for work. There is a huge crowd of men both young and old standing on one corner of the square and things get noisy as a truck pulls up. A man gets out and stands on the back of the truck and points his finger at half a dozen men and they quickly leap aboard with their sack and the truck roars off. I sit and eat my morning bananas and watch another and then another truck pull up and men jump aboard. Not too dissimilar from the unemployment office at home, with despondent overweight old men being left behind judged to be of little value in the workplace. My lift arrives and after a few hostel pick-ups, we are on our way to the little airstrip at Nazca.

“I was bitten by this monkey on a jungle tour…” Emily is a hippy chick who is travelling alone in South America and is sitting next to me beside the swimming pool as we wait for our turn to come up for the forty-five-minute plane flight above the famous and mysterious Nazca lines.

“…Well it was more of a lick actually, and everyone said I must get it seen to and get some tablets and stuff.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, I took an eight-hour bus journey back to the town I had left vowing never to return to and headed straight for the doctors. He sits there and says that he doesn’t have what I need and that I need to fly to La Paz.”

“La Paz!?”

“Yeah exactly, that’s what I thought so I figured if my time is up and this monkey is the death of me then at least I get to die travelling in such a cool place.”

“So you left it?”

“Yeah, I emailed everyone back home and I don’t think they expect me to survive but that was five days ago and I’m still here, right?”

“Right.” Just when things are getting interesting with the enchanting Emily we are called up for our flights. A middle-aged American couple comes with me and I find myself seated in a plane with them. Emily has to take the next plane. Our plane motors down the desert strip runway I wave Emily goodbye knowing that I won’t see her again regardless of the monkey bite.

Our pilot wears a uniform that British Airways would be proud of complete with gold trimmings on his black shoulder pads and Ray-Bans wrap around sunglasses. He looks cool and instils confidence, which is handy as our plane circles and steeply banks for about forty-five minutes so that we can view these extraordinary geometric shapes and lines known as the Nazca lines.

To start with the lines can only be seen from the air and it is well known that ancient peoples couldn’t fly and even if they could fly how on Earth did they carve these lines into the earth in such accurate ways with perfectly parallel lines running for over a hundred metres and depicting complex animal shapes such as the mighty condor. Some say that the long lines that cover almost all of the barren land to the horizon depict the origin of water sources, which would be of obvious use to ancient peoples. Then there is always the alien theory. From my limited knowledge and experience, I opt for the reason to lie in the close relationship that the Nazcans had with the cosmos and its relationship with life down on Earth. The night sky seems to have been observed and translated onto the desert floor. But I am left with many questions unanswered after my short flight and in awe of a different kind of intelligence, something that is so far removed from modern-day thinking that we cannot even guess as to its origins or workings.

We assume that humanity develops and progresses forward over time and thus by definition we are more intelligent and ‘better’ than our predecessors. After my short flight above the lines, I am left wondering how many people on Earth can still tap into this almost mythical, certainly mystical, source. I am more than intrigued.

The rest of the day continues to get more interesting with a visit to an ancient cemetery. As a psychology undergraduate, I became fascinated with the various views that people have on death and dying and what people do when a person dies. You would never guess to look at me that I’m always this morbid. The cemetery is on high land, some short distance away from water and ancient settlements. The land is strewn with fragments of human bones for some distance in all directions. What ceremonies and atrocities have this land seen? Across an area, some two hundred metres square are twelve tombs containing preserved mummies. Our group trails around each tomb quietly staring at each mummy in turn. Grave robbers had found and unsettled these ancient resting places and I can’t help but feel that someone will pay for this, the most sinful of crimes. The mummies are prepared in a conical shape wrapped in prized clothes and would have been surrounded by offerings of food, water and beautiful gold and silver objects. The idea was that they would have all they needed for the next life. This extended to people accompanying the person who had died (by way of sacrifice or murder) into the next life.

It was common for a high-status male (signified by extremely long dreadlocked hair) that had died to be buried with all members of his family and other women that he ‘possessed’. Thus some of the tombs contain mummified children. It’s easy with a western mind to be shocked by this process and to discount it but the civilization in that time, I believe, had a very different view on death from that we have today. The air around the cemetery and the area itself holds an unmistakable silence to it and has what can only be described as a presence, something not to be discounted either.

I am still thinking about the mummies when I find myself wandering around the gold extracting museum and later still the pottery museum. Both of which are very interesting, but not as captivating as the cemetery. I have the urge to buy a stone in the beautiful converted house that is the pottery factory, the tourist trade-off thing again. I buy one with a picture of a condor on, as depicted in geometric form like in the Nazca lines. I hope that the condor stone will guide me and take me to places that may access at least a little of this ancient knowledge and experience that has me so captivated. I close my eyes and hold my stone tight in my hand as we return to town and concentrate on its warmth glowing in my hand.

On arriving back at the town it appears that all the buses are booked for the journey to Arequipa, yeah right. The next available bus is tomorrow evening and I am keen to move on to the next place, are there no buses today? It turns out that I can get a seat on the bus across the road that is due to leave in 20 minutes. I am tired after a long day and consider how long it will take to get back to my hostel, retrieve my backpack and get back to the bus. The trip itself will be through the night so would not be ideal. I hold my condor stone and think for a moment. So a mad scramble to make the bus and I am destined for Arequipa. It feels like I am doing the right thing somehow, like my guides watching over me approve.

The journey ahead is long, some eighteen hours south to Arequipa, and involves careful planning of fluid intake because toilet stops don’t exist and the driver only stops when he is hungry and to pick people up on route. We stop at one small village with night falling to let some people join our crew and women are shouting in high-pitched voices on either side of the bus.

“NARANJAS…NARANJAS…NARANJAS!” and bunches of oranges, hung on the ends of long poles, appear at each window. Now that is what I call window-shopping. Some of the locals buy the oranges through the window and others wait for the select few that bribe the driver to be let aboard to sell their wares to the passengers. These ladies have a whole array of products, most of which any guidebook would tell you to avoid.

The one that tempts me most is spicy chicken on a stick. I must try that. I don’t care how long the chicken has been hanging around, or what state the chickens have been kept in (or killed in) it tastes fantastic. I question when we will stop at a place with a toilet and hope my constitution is as strong as I think it is. The stop comes about halfway into the journey and thankfully the runs have not attacked me but I am bursting for the toilet, so much so that my face starts contorting beyond my control. I look at all the Peruvians smiling back at me on the bus and wonder if incontinence pads are available wholesale in Peru.

I run to the toilet and fumble for my fifty centimos, accept my little wad of paper and open the dam that has held the floodwaters for so long. I stand for what seems an eternity as short Peruvians stand next to me, finish, and are replaced by another. I look at the four sheets of toilet paper and ponder if the Peruvians have all been taught the ‘to the four corners of the world’ army technique of wiping and thank my stomach for being loyal. The spicy chicken serves as a nice starter and most locals are tucking into a full meal at this deserted bus stop, so show me the Lomo Saltado.

I haven’t been in Peru long but I have already learnt that if the locals do it you can't go too far wrong. The driver had not said how long the break would be and as I sit at my table, having paid for my dinner, I wait anxiously for my food as some of my fellow bus passengers start one by one to go outside and wait for the bus. I think the bus driver just leaves whenever he feels like it and is ultimately God in such situations being in the middle of nowhere. At the same time, it is not a coincidence that I get served last. I pour the plate of piping hot food down my neck as nearly everyone has left the huge blue dining hall and another bus is turning up.

There is no hoot nor anyone shouting for passengers, the bus lights come on and then seconds later the bus pulls away. Thankfully I left my meal, or what was left of it, as my anxiety had grown too high. But it wasn’t easy to leave my Lomo. Our bus pulls away and I question how regularly the waiters play this game with the gringos and whether I have broken some long-held speed record for eating Lomo Saltado, whilst they no doubt share the food that is left behind in a flurry of combats and backpacks.

Can’t wait for the next chapter to be published? Join me as I head by boat to the jungle city of Iquitos.

Neil Mapes Bio

Beach wanderer, sea swimmer, trail runner and charity leader. Loving life in the Highlands of Scotland.

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