Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters
Grant Lee Buffalo, "Truly"
My Christmas List
Turkey Chilli Or, anything from my wish list.
Excerpts from Day Four of My Travel Journal Post Date: 11/15/04
Original Journal Date: 11/01/04 Hi. To be clear, this update is late because I brought a very special souvenir back from Peru. A stomach parasite, probably from the same water that inspired this title. Excellent. I'm feeling much better, though, and here's the next set of Peru stories. Really. Abdominal cramping can be sexy. 11-01-Monday, Nazca
This morning, somebody needed to give up their space on the plane ride over the Nazca lines. Not being a huge fan of small planes, having been drinking heavily the night before, and being tempted by the beautiful sunshine and swimming pool, I volunteered. I hear the plane ride was amazing, but I'm pretty happy with how my morning worked out. First, after a lovely breakfast with some suspect looking juice and plenty of tea, I went running. I ran out to some ruins and through the marketplace. I had poverty guilt again, which is unfortunate. As I'm there running in my $100 Asics, men, women and children have to haul chicken and vegetables on their backs for miles and miles to the market. They'll never need to go buy some dry weave for their daily run because they get all the exercise they need just by existing. And the marketplace? Surreal. I'm absolutely confident that I saw the same chickens Ho and Fernando later ate for dinner running around in the street. I thought when I didn't take the plane ride that I would end up regretting it. But I never did. I ended up loving my morning and watching the world get to work in the marketplace. Okay, first stop, Nazca burial ground. Our poor tour guide, Pedro, who actually works with the archeologists and cleans the mummies when they are discovered, had no idea what he was getting himself into. At the end of our tour of the tombs, Pedro explained to us that he usually only talks through the first three or four graves before people just want to look at the tombs by themselves. But because we had had so many questions he had talked though all twelve tombs. We tipped him well, largely because he said this thing about how much more work we were and then stood there with his payment in his hand looking at us like he was waiting for us to tip him more. We also learned a lot, though, so this didn't bother us. Yeah. We were really not short on questions. I think it took us almost two hours to look at twelve tombs, and I'm as guilty as anybody else. We referred to this as geek vacationing. Among the things we learned: The Nazcas created adobe and stone underground tombs in three varieties. There we single tombs for very important people. There were larger tombs to bury complete families, and there were very large tombs that were basically communal for everybody else. The dead were treated and mummified, wrapped in elaborate textiles and buried facing east with some of their possessions. Usually, the possessions included ceramics. There were also three types of ceramics: household and every day, decorative and ceremonial. Most of the decorative or ceremonial ceramics have been stolen by now (see upcoming rant), but there were plenty of examples of the thicker, every day pottery. One mummy was even buried with a pet parrot, proving that there had been trading or integration with the jungle and mountain tribes. Because of the coastal climate, everything was extremely well preserved, including not only the bones and sometimes the skin, but also the mummy's hair. And hair was a topic. Some of the mummies had red hair, which Pedro explained to us was due to malnutrition. Malnutrition makes no sense because the Nazca were a coastal tribe, which means there were always fish and sea plants. In fact, the Nazca had such an elaborate set up that they actually had tribe members who job it was to live in huts leading to the ocean so that the fresh fish could be transported back to the village as fast as possible. The huts were set up so that nobody had to run more than ten kilometers with the fish. So malnutrition makes no sense. Pedro agreed, and apparently there are studies going on right now about that. Also, one mummy's red hair was actually dyed, which meant he was a warrior. And also, hair was a status symbol in Nazca culture, so only certain members of society were allowed to grow their hair long. When that happened, though, it was amazing and there were dreadlocks down to people's ankles. Many of those heads of hair have been preserved and saved and displayed in the tombs. I told you we weren't short on questions. There were also a ton of children buried there. A ton. Which, you know, fits the historical pattern. Pedro, in explaining to us why the infant mortality rate was so high said that the Nazca didn't really know how to care for children and often gave them bad water or undercooked food. But this, too, was baffling since the Nazca culture was clearly smart enough to create elaborate irrigation systems (see below when we get to the aqua ducts), geometrically perfect art in the Nazca lines and advanced scientific treatments for burial. It boggles the mind that they couldn't get a handle on infant health. Boggles.the.mind. Eventually, we moved on to our next stop. Nazca ruins. The ruins were nice, though while everybody else climbed around I opted to sit and absorb. That's my story. We hadn't dug up a guide for the ruins, but in retrospect we wish we had. On the other hand, that guide too would have run from us in fear after our hundredth question. Anyway, the ruins were nice. And then onto the aqua ducts, where we did have a guide. Alex. Alex used to be a professor of geology, but because it's such a political system in Peru he kept getting passed over for promotion and eventually decided to study tourism instead. Now he basically runs the tours and souvenirs at the Nazca aqua ducts. Which, by the way, were awesome and which we learned a ton about because we had a million and one questions. For example, we learned that the aqua ducts, which in case you don't know are underground tunnels that carry the fresh water from the mountains down into the lowlands to provide farming irrigation and drinking water, are still used as the water source for many of the locals. We also learned that 1000 children a year die from bad water in the area. Ten minutes before we learned that, most of us took off our shoes and walked through one of the underground segments of the aqua ducts to see what it was like underneath. That water will not be filtered and then drunk by locals! Yep. The aqua ducts are amazing though. They run for miles and miles and miles with periodic holes that come up to the ground where people could enter the aqua ducts to clean them. The holes also provided ventilation for when other people were down in the aqua ducts. The construction is unreal. You really can't imagine that this fairly primitive society really built these, but they must have. Amazing. Water is tunneled for miles and miles. Efficiently. And the same technology still works today. Most people take half an hour to explore the aqua ducts. We took seventy-five minutes. I got into the car with Fernando after the tour and he gave me a look. All I could say was, "Lisa tiene muchas preguntas. Siempre." See how I took no responsibility myself there? Here's the best moment. We're all in the car. We're all settled in. We're ready to pull out and go. All of a sudden, Lisa says, "We never got a picture with our guide!" and ALL FOUR OF THEM jump out of the car to run and get a picture with the guide. It was impossible for us to move as a group 99.9 percent of the time, but mention that a photo had been overlooked and four people move at the speed of light. And also, I got to take a photo of a donkey's ass. Look for that in your Christmas card. And also, this exchange.
You're sun burnt. You got sun burnt through your clothing. I didn't know it was possible to get sun burnt through clothing. Me
Look, you can see my nipples. This shirt is so thin it's like not wearing clothing at all.