Posted by 
012105
A quick shower, a snack bar breakfast, and a final twist up of pre-flight anti-nauseant had me outside my hotel waiting for my ride well before 8am. Soon enough an old beat-up Dodge Coronet pulled up and my tour dude jumped out with a smile and a wave, beckoning me into the car and introducing me to Jesus, our stocky, middle-aged driver.
Jesus drove us to a nearby hotel to pick up a couple of fellow tourists but clearly they weren’t using the same alarm clock as I was and we ended up waiting a good twenty minutes for them to come down and join us. And a good twenty minutes it was too, for the moment I expressed an interest in the old Coronet Jesus smiled from ear to ear and asked if I’d like to see under the hood. I did.
By most metrics I’m not a car guy but I come from a car family, so while I might not be able to pinpoint the precise year of a Plymouth Barracuda at a glance or argue the merits of dropping a 454 big-block engine into an otherwise all-original 1968 Corvette due to nature or nurture I can still take great pleasure in the beauty of design and the quality of craftsmanship in automobiles of a certain vintage, and moreover I find it easy to share the love of cars when I find it in others.
Almost all of the automobiles I had seen in Peru had been small Asian models, tiny Daewoo’s and similar cookie-cutter gas misers. The only recognizable car I was seeing with any regularity were Volkswagen Beetles, which were very common, though American models were pretty much nonexistent. But with gas priced around twelve soles per litre it’s no surprise that people would favour fuel efficient minis. A sole is about thirty cents US so that’s $3.60 per litre in a country where the average hotel room cost around twenty soles a night (though I was usually getting rooms for ten).
Jesus was studying to be an official tour guide (I mean he was literally studying his beautifully handwritten notebook for an exam scheduled later in the day) and he wanted to shuttle tourists around in a nice big American car so not only did he drop a Japanese diesel engine into the Dodge but he also converted it from automatic to standard, effectively doubling his kilometrage to eight per litre. He had done all the work himself and I was dutifully impressed. He was overjoyed that I showed such an interest and after exploring the engine he took me through the trunk and then we got down on all fours to check out the exhaust system and the undercarriage. By the time the tour dude finally returned with the two guys I’d had a better tour of that car than I was about to get of the Nazca lines.
Once Jesus delivered us to Nazca’s small, desolate airport we three tourists were ushered into a viewing room and were shown a video on the lines – a British documentary actually – and next thing you know we were out on the tarmac ready to clamber into a four-seater Cessna.
The ensuing forty minutes was much akin to leafing through a live, actual-size issue of National Geographic magazine. Vast, timeless, and endlessly curious, the Nazca lines have captured the world’s imagination since aviation made them rediscoverable. That is, it wasn’t until planes started flying over the area that the ancient geoglyphs could be seen and deciphered for what they were, which only made the whole thing that much more mysterious. Mysterious enough to have quickly joined the likes of the Egyptian pyramids, Easter Island, and Roswell, New Mexico as one of the world’s biggest head-scratchers.
And of course the lines are manna for UFOlogists.
We’ve all seen them, the monkey with its spiraling tail, the spaceman carved into the mountain, the hummingbird, the spider, and I saw them all from that little plane, just not as close up or as clear as one sees them in pictures. Don’t get me wrong, even though it was more of a real-life review than an exhilerating discovery – like seeing The Rolling Stones in concert, say – it was an amazing experience to see them with my own eyes.
The animal pictographs were cool but I was particularly struck by the hundreds upon hundreds of straight lines. They are impossibly long and remarkably straight, and they run so extraordinarily willy-nilly that the alien conspiracy theorists can’t decide whether they are landing pads or star charts or a dozen other (im)possibilites. The lines don’t seem affected at all by the geography they encounter, as they run over hills and through valleys without altering whatsoever from their razor-sharp straightness. It was just a crazy thing to witness, especially with a pilot who eagerly zigged back and forth tipping his tiny aircraft this way and that so we wide-eyed and shutter-happy passengers could get the best views possible.
Still better in the magazines though.
Just when I worried I might have just as easily saved the $30US that I’d shelled out for the experience and instead taken a cab to the public viewing platform where one could see several straight lines and the famous eagle pictograph for free we flew over it. Man, that would have been a disappointment.
After the flight the three of us waited an easy hour for our ride back to town, and when the car came I was overjoyed to see that once again it was Jesus and his Coronet. My favourite thing about Jesus turned out not to be his car, but his whistle. Peruvians can whistle, that’s for sure. As a culture, they have it down to a science. People are constantly busting out a loud tweet-tweet to get attention or as a warning or what-have-you, but Jesus had a grand, loud, melodious whistle that was his audio calling card. He had a five-note phrase (B F# E G# B) that was instantly recognizable and (as my memory would come to prove) quite unforgettable, and it turned out that all of his friends did the same whistle.
A dozen times as we drove along he would turn his head and blast his melody out the window and invariably the friend that he’d just spotted on the sidewalk would echo back the same five-note phrase. I can whistle well enough by Canadian standards, but when Jesus offered to teach me his little tune, try as I might I just couldn’t hit the notes. When I gave up and lowered it to a more comfortable key he was pleased enough, but what really turned his crank was the short video I took of him doing the whistle. When I played it back for him Jesus almost exploded with pride, and from that point forward I had to show the clip to every friend that he could whistle down.
Dropping me at my hotel, Jesus asked if I’d like to take a sight-seeing tour after lunch and I jumped at the chance, but somehow we ended up missing each other. I did, however, get one more smile when I went to the tour office to ask where Jesus was. With such a common name the clerk didn’t know who I was referring to so I did the whistle and without batting an eye the guy told me that Jesus had already left for the day to write his exam.
With an afternoon to kill I decided to walk to the bus station to buy my ongoing ticket. It was about two kilometres each way (once I found the correct bus station) through the blazing hot desert sun (Nazca is one of the driest places on Earth, averaging a single inch of rain per decade), but at least I saved four soles on taxi fare. As an added bonus the beer I ordered when I got back to my hotel tasted that much sweeter.
With little to fill my time I set off walking back to the depot once the sun had started to wane, but still well ahead of my 6pm departure for Cuzco. Along the way I passed a music store. They mostly sold bootleg CD’s but through the window I could see a guitar hanging on the wall. I’d been itching to play so I popped my head inside and asked if I could sit and pick at it for a while. The guy readily agreed and soon he grabbed a second guitar for himself. He started pointing to CD’s asking me to play songs from them. First it was Eric Clapton, then the Red Hot Chili Peppers, then The Cars, and luckily years of teaching allowed me to have a song ready for every artist he pointed to. Then he asked me to show him the twelve bar blues and a few other things and I happily obliged. In the end I passed a really fun hour in his shop, and I still got to the bus station with plenty of time to stock up on supplies for my overnight journey.
And so with a handful of beers, a tube of off-brand Pringles, and a large bag of coca leaves I boarded the bus and settled into a Jackie Chan movie dubbed in Spanish with no subtitles (at two soles per pound, coca leaves are not only dirt cheap in Peru but they are legal too, and chewing on them is a common and effective way of acclimatizing to the huge and potentially dangerous elevation changes that one experiences when travelling through the Andes Mountains).
Nazca is about 400m above sea level while Cuzco’s elevation is around 3,400m, so as the winding road to Cuzco takes us approximately 700 kilometres forward – though as the condor flies it’s more like 250 kilometres – we would also be going three kilometres straight up. It would be the equivalent of driving a bus about a third of the way up Mount Everest, and at times it felt like exactly that. Driving doesn’t make me nervous but fifteen hours of constant mountain switchbacks on a narrow road with no railing is enough to get my nerves on end.
The Central Cross Highway in Taiwan is at least as treacherous and I had travelled that a half-dozen times, but always by motorcycle. Careening precariously through the dizzying mountain turns in a full-sized Greyhound is a whole different story. Sometimes it seemed literally impossible for the huge bus to make it around the 180+º turns, and yet the driver kept on. I swear there were times that the back of the bus (where I was sitting) was extended over the edge, so much that I began praying for night, which soon came.
With the shroud of darkness came an ignorance blissful enough to partner up with my body’s exhaustion and offer me nearly a dozen hours of fitful sleep, despite a depleting pound-bag of coca leaves.
So you know I was tired.
Todd Man Out 