Saturday, Jennifer and I celebrated 15 years of being married by taking the family on the Pan Amerca highway 250km south of Lima to
Paracas, the name of a small coastal town and the name of the nearby preserve. The drive down was relatively uneventful, unless you count Carter's first sighting of a llama. Of course, the llama was drinking out of the pool at an abandoned motel...so perhaps not its native habitat. South of Lima, we drove through the
Atacama Desert, a place of rolling dunes of sand and fine dirt, without a spec of life to be seen— not a shrub, not a cactus, nada. There are a couple of alluvial river valleys where the water from the Andes feeds farms and towns, notably Chincha (known for it's wine) and Cañete (more on Cañete as we drive back!).
At the shoreline, where the desert schlumps into the sea, lies Paracas, a small fishing village that is now mostly lodging and boat tours for the tourists going out to the wildlife sanctuary out on the nearby islands: Las Islas Ballestas. We arrived at noon, plenty of time to enjoy the hotel view of the bay, brave the unheated pool or opt for the jacuzzi, and play a little
Zapito (the "little frog", a game you find everywhere in which a token is tossed into holes for points). My lunch was a fabulously fresh piece of peppered tuna, fresh from the village and perfectly done. Wonderful meals seem the rule in Peru so far, I think I need to stop mentioning them.
In the afternoon, the clouds dissipated and the glassy water was
transformed as the wind started to blast the sand along the beach.
Kitesurfers suddenly appeared as Jen, Carter and I strolled along the
beach marveling at the giant, doomed jellyfish stranded at the
waterline.
We retired early so as to be ready for our boat trip out to the islands at 8am Sunday morning. For $20/person you get a ride on a powerful motorboat with seating for roughly 20, and a pilot and a tourguide. On the way out, we went around Paracas Point to view a giant geoglyph carved into the hillside facing out to the sea.
The 600-ft image is called Candelabro ("Candelabra"), though no one can say for sure what it represents. Best estimates place it from 200 B.C., created by the Paracas culture, a pre-Inca society known now for amazing, woven artifacts. The boat then turned out to sea and in a half-hour we were in the midst of millions of birds. Our photos do NOT do it justice. The islands were, for a long time, the heart of Peru's top export of guano (nitrate-rich bird crap). In some places, the guano is 5m deep; the islands still have some of the structures left by the harvesters, but they are protected now.
BIRD VARIETY: our cruddy photos are not clear enough to show the amazing diversity of birds we saw. Cormorants, gulls, Inca terns, Humboldt penguins (!), boobies...and sea lions all over, bobbing up to watch the boats go by. I am posting a couple of photos (the closeup of penguins and of Inca terns) that I am borrowing from online, just to show a sample of what we were able to see.
BIRD QUANTITY: Holy moly, I'm not sure I can impart sufficiently the huge number of birds. Different varieties cluster in different areas, so there would be a a cliff-side inhabited by swarms of cormorants but also here and there would be a red-footed booby who seemed happy to be on the wrong side of the tracks. One island is called White Island for the mountain of guano upon it, but it was so covered in Guanay Cormorants that the hill appeard black from a distance. These cormorants are known as the million-dollar bird because theirs is the highest quality and quantity of poop. These cormorants go out into the sea once per day for a bath and the boat took us out to the spot where thousands (tens of thousands?) of them were splashing in the water. But it was an ongoing process, like the Berlin Airlift, so if you looked over to the south of the island, swarms of cormorants were inbound for the bathing area...and if you looked over your other shoulder at the north, swarms were on the return flight path to the island. It was a giant, clockwise process.
We were back in a couple hours, enough time for another dip in the jacuzzi and a game of Zapito, a basic lunch in the village, and then back in the car. On the return trip we stopped in the Cañete area to visit the site of a Peace Corps volunteer in a hamlet called San Luis de Cañete. The volunteer, nicknamed Goyo, is the oldest volunteer in Peru at 61. He invited us to see the
ruins and burial ground perched atop the hill by the town.
A couple warnings:
1. What we saw was, while fascinating, gruesome. What follows is explicit about the details of the burial ground and may put some folk in a queasy way. I have posted the more explicit photos separately for those who care to see them (>here<).
2. We were able witness much because this burial ground has been assaulted by grave robbers. To us gringos standing there, it seemed incredible/horrible that this site is not preserved or even fenced off. Goyo reacted this way originally, but the university experts AND local police were markedly uninterested when he brought them out to the site. It is becoming clear that this country overflows with artifacts and remains, so even the good people here can not save it all. The burial ground is completely compromised and has been for decades (if not centuries). We were as respectful as possible under these conditions. Goyo says most townspeople do not even know of the burial ground, though they know in a vague way that there are ruins up on the hill. I encourage you to avoid the separate gallery of photos, or even stop reading now, if you feel this reality will be unbearably upsetting to you.
The hill rises as a pile of fine dust up out of the farmlands of the valley. There is effectively no rain here and the hill is a bit of desert poking up from the rich valley, with adobe ruins atop. The ruins are from the
Huari, a pre-Inca culture that faded around 800 A.D.
After a steep, narrow track through some hillside homes and animal pens, we parked the car and within a few steps were standing amid piles and piles of bones.
The burial ground was downhill of the settled area and must have seen centuries of burials. The area is
several acres variously pockmarked with the holes dug by treasure
seekers, strewn with bones and remnants of artifacts. Skulls abound, some still with full heads of hair. Torsos still with skin show arms folded in front. One skull even still held its dessicated brain, another dried eyeballs. There are pottery shards and a few intact vessels. On some we could make out a painted pattern. Some had rope through their handles for carrying. There was much rope, amazing because of the tightness of the braiding and splicing, still strong today. There was also a lot of thatch, as if the bodies were laid to rest under thatch. There were bundles of sticks, leaves wound up in fabric (coca? tobacco? fishing net floats?)...Carter even found a pristine piece of soapstone.
Particularly amazing and abundant was the woven material. There were examples in which 4 or 5 colors were apparent, designs and complex patterns, all tightly woven and of a quality that would pass as modern if it was pristine. It was mind-boggling to be handling things like this, with the town, the traffic of the Pan American highway and the ocean all visible so close. 1200 year old workmanship!
Again, the link to more intense photos at:
this link
We walked up to the top of the hill to see the settled area, with packed
adobe walls showing the layout of rooms with windows, recesses, holes
for beams. Previous visitors have scratched their names into some of the
walls. Amazingly, just below this area of ruins, we came upon a
blossoming "field" of air plants (epiphytes). There is no soil here,
just the driest of fine desert dust, but these plants simply sit
rootless above the ground, drinking in the mist. Each had a stalk with
purple flowers scented similar to jasmine. After the gruesome experience
of the burial area, it was hard not to ascribe some redemptive meaning
to stumbling upon something so unexpected, so affirmative of life, so
lovely.
