We had leisurely start to our day. Instead of a buying a hostel breakfast, we opted to cook for ourselves in the kitchen. I finally remembered how to say 'bowl' in Spanish: 'plato onda.' We filled ours to the brims with an oatmeal/qinuoa mixture that went well with sugar.
Before we went to the lines, we had to do some planning for the remaing time we had in Peru. We decided we would divide our days between Arequipa, Colca Canyon, Cuzco (with Machu Picchu) and finally the jungle. As for me, I silently resolved myself to go to the Cordillera Blanca during the week I´d spend in Peru alone.
With our schedule worked out, the next question was how we would see the lines that day. No one felt like shelling out for a plane ride so we decided that we would go out to the mirador (viewing tower) which was about 12 miles outside of town. There were supposed to be a slew of minibusses in the town center waiting to take us out there, but when we got to the pickup area, we were unable to understand who was going where. There were trucks filled with fruit, motorcycles and mototaxis, all belching fumes within a confused and shouting morass.
We wandered up and down the strip for a while, trying to figure things out. We were close to giving up when some guy with a car asked us if we wanted a ride out to the miradore. For the privilidge, we would pay him twenty soles. We realized that we were taking an unregistered cab, but the price was excellent because he didn't have to pay the highway tolls that an official taxi would. We later found out that most rides to the mirador cost fifty soles a pop. As usual, sketchy equals good value.
The guy ushered us into his car and I took a seat behind the felt dashboard and strange stuffed animals. We had hardly driven a minute when he stopped and shouted at a woman who was looking to go to Ica and got her to cram into the backseat with Max and Ben. Now that the car was fully loaded with four passengers, our driver stood to make the most money.
The cab sped along the Panamerican Highway through a desert waste that was far dufferent from Huacachina. Rather than the beautiful smooth sand we had seen before, the plains of Nazca were filled with broken, jagged rock, the kind that the Nazca and Wari civilizations had removed thousands of years prior to reveal the sand beneath and create the lines.
"This better not be it" was what I said when I saw the viewing tower standing by the side of the highway. It was a skeletal, banged up construction of wood and metal and only about 60 feet up. The sign said that it could hold no more than ten at a time so we were lucky that there was only one other group out there.
There was a small souveneir stand at the base of the tower and a guy who collected the two sole fee.
"Are you from Ireland?" he asked me in soft English. "You have beautiful eyes; I can hardly see them."
I was thrown a bit off guard, but thanked him, and told him that I'd been to Ireland though I was from the USA. I hadn't been wearing any shamrock or Guinness apparel, so it had been an interesting assumption.
At the top of the tower where we could clearly discern the outlines of a tree and a pair disembodied hands below. There were also the more striking straight tracks in the sand, which stretched out into the desert for miles. If anything, the nonrepresentational, parallel lines, built later than the drawings, held an even gerater mystery. As I looked down from the tower, these strange and ancient lines (insert History Channel narrative here) raised the still unanswered question: Why?
The guy that had taken our money at the base of the tower came up and explained some of the archaeologically significant details of the marks before us. He also told us how beautiful we all were.
We spent a bit more time in the tower and then went back down to the Panamerican Highway. It would be a long walk back to town if we couldn´t get a ride. Still, we weren´t interested in hitching just yet and there was a small hill down the road we could climb for a different (free) view of the lines. With the hot sun beating down, we trekked along the bizzare landscape. The three of us looked like a trio of post-apocalyptic refugees setting out to meet our destiny. Meanwhile, cars and busses whizzed by us and the sky was crisscrossed with chartered planes filled with tourists that wanted to see the lines from above.
The hill basically gave us the same view that we had from the tower, but provided a nice place where we could sit and watch the mountains and the lines. Eventually we went back to the highway and wondered how we would got back. We were about to set back for the tower, when a Soyuz bus pulled over. We ended up paying two soles to get to Nazca.
We spent the rest of the day in a leisurely, unambitious fashion. We got our luch at some tiki tourist trap, toured a museum of Nazca artifacts and went back to the hostel. Ben and I opted to skip the daily run and instead try to get to the top of the small mountain outside of town with its cross on top. Sound familar? Like Cerro San Cristobal in Lima, this looked deceptively easy. In fact we needed to cut around people's backyards, irrigation ditches (some of these were literally ancient)and walls. In the back of my mind, I was waiting for the viscious dogs to come leaping out of nowhere. As we cut accross a massive field of broken stone and rubble, Ben and I realized that there would be no way for us to climb the hill and get back before nightfall, so we turned around.
I should also mention that Nazca is home to the biggest sand dune in the world. Standing at over six-thousand feet of elevation above the town, it is taller than Mount Washington, the highest mountain in New England. We could see the megadune towering over us when we went outside the hostel. If the sands of Huacachina were any model, climbing that bastard would have taken more time and energy than we could have set aside for a mere day-hike.
That night, we caught our ten o'clock bus to Arequipa at midnight. I did some writing in the station and sampled one of the cheap, artificially flavored cookies Ben had bought earlier. It started out sweet but then the component chemicals dissolved, bringing out a horrifying aftertaste of mothballs.
Despite the fact that it had arrived late, the Tepsa bus more than reedemed itself with its mindblowing luxury. We settled into our fully reclining seats and had staff wait on us with boxes of mango juice and blankets so that we could sleep during the eight hour ride. Another plus was the onboard bathroom, even though every time I looked up, the occupied light was on. Perhaps a couple had been earning their membership to the meter high club. No matter, I leaned back in my seat and was soon asleep.
When I woke up, the sun was coming into the cabin. We were driving down from a desert pass, and the bus wound between massive walls of stone. I also had some fine views of sandy planes and cacti growing along the side of the road. In a short while, we came into in Arequipa, hailed a cab from the bus station and arrived at the hostel. We were a day late, but glad to have had the diversion.
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