Abancay is the usual high altitude town totally lacking in road signs, one way signs or people who know the way to anywhere. Maybe they never leave. Three visiting Americans told us the way out of town! Traffic is sparse, mostly heavy goods heading for Nasca, all slowly slogging uphill and struggling just as much downhill to spare inadequate brakes. One lorry had ended up half way down a mountainside, quite recently too, obviously the brakes had given way. Looters hadn’t left much.

Lunchbreak was interesting. A huge shadow passed over us. We looked up to see not one but six condors riding the thermals. You could quite clearly see the white ruffs through binoculars. We were parked up close to a rocky vertical mountain face, perfect condor territory where they can just launch themselves off cliff faces and cruise effortlessly upwards on warm air currents. Lucky for us they only feed on carrion.

Puquio is the last high altitude town before Nasca, a small trading centre for the surrounding rural communities with appalling dirt roads. Clear skies gave way to rain, then fog and low cloud as we breached the last high altitude pass and started to descent to Nasca. Green gave way to brown, rain gave way to dry; desert prevailed. Nasca is a dust dry, scruffy and not entirely safe town surrounded by flimsy slum dwellings made from what looks like basketweave panels. It never rains here and the hot temperatures year round mean that you can get by with insubstantial housing. The usual garbage, smells, stray dogs and traffic fumes do nothing to attract the tourist, yet Nasca is a holiday destination for Peruvians and a big international draw because of the Nasca Lines.

It was still the Easter holiday period and all the light plane flights over the Nasca Lines were full. The TC pulled many interested parties. One of them was Miguel, a chap who worked at the airport and who could fix us up with a very early morning flight in a Cessna for the same price as the official tour operators. You have to be very careful in this neck of the woods for touts and crooks, but we took him at his word. He picked us up in a taxi that had previously served as a hen coup. You could have grown potatoes on the back seat and you could barely see out of the cracked windscreen. This is Peru at the sharp end.

He had told us on no account to eat breakfast. He was genuine, he did work at the airport and we were filling in last minute availability seats so we had to wait a few minutes. We ended up in the back seats of a Cessna with two glamorous women perfumed and coiffed to death in front of us and a young boy of twelve sat next to the pilot. It felt like the plane was held together with string and superglue. Take off was worrying but the views of the lines were incredible. Until he started to bank the plane to allow us to take photos of the lines. It’s hard to see anything with eyes firmly closed. Things started to get a bit bumpy. It took a while to realise that the boy was actually flying the plane. Lucky for us he didn’t feel up to landing it.

I have since developed my theory of religious transport. I prefer, nay insist, that drivers of buses, cars, taxis, trains and plane pilots carry proof that they are atheists. Atheists realise that this life is not a rehearsal, there are no rewards in heaven for tolerating a horrible life so make the most of what days you have left and most importantly of all, survive to see another day. All this better life hereafter stuff infers that they are not particularly interested in this life right now. And as for making offering to the gods every morning so that you can drive, with impunity, like someone possessed does not pass muster in my new theory. Atheists rule OK. Here endeth the sermon.

No-one has proved one way or the other who made the Nasca lines. Most of them, and there are far more than we ever realised, are straight lines, narrow and wide and funnel shaped. A few are representations of animals not found in the Nasca area, but of animals found in the Amazon. One theory is that they were made by little green men from outer space as spacecraft landing strips. If that is the case then little green men like a challenge – some of the lines are not laid out on flat desert but on lumpy terrain.

The alien theory is supported by findings of skeletons with long thin skulls with substantial holes drilled through bone in the centre of what would have been the forehead. However, some South American tribes deliberately deformed the skulls of babies with bindings, and the holes were probably made by some witchdoctor or other to allow the easier exit of evil spirits. The Lines are obviously meant to be viewed from the air and the Nascans did not have Cessnas. The latest theory is that they did however have balloon technology so the Lines were meant to be viewed by shamans. I prefer the alien theory. You would have to be off another planet to want to live around there anyway.

From Nasca, we would be heading north towards Ecuador through coastal desert for days on end. It was while passing through a small town – Palpa – that we saw a white rubber bumper MGB coming towards us! Both men were from Buenos Aires and had driven on a tour from Argentina to Lima and down through Peru and were heading back home through Chile. This was the first MG we had seen and the fourth classic car in months. They were as surprised to see us as we were to see them. They were true MG people, part of the brotherhood and a delight to talk to.

Sadly, this pleasant experience was rapidly followed by our first Peruvian private enterprise policemen. You only have to look at them to know what’s coming. Conversation was chatty and long winded at first and it took them a while to size up the chances of relieving us of some of our petrol by draining off our tank so that they could carry on their police work in a diesel vehicle somehow devoid of fuel. Our grasp of Spanish suddenly vaporised, no comprendo was all we could muster and despite repeated attempts to play charades to get us to surrender petrol, they failed. It isn’t just gringos they try this on with; they think they have a right, reinforced by carrying firearms, to supplement their income by any devious means to relieve anyone in a car of petrol or cash.

On our lunchstop in a fly ridden, filthy, garbage strewn layby (they are all like this, there is no alternative), we devised a plan of action to get us through the rest of Peru. We decided that "no comprendo" from the very start, regardless of whether they looked bent or not, was the procedure to follow. Police stops were either on entry into towns, and if not, on exit. So, coming near to settlements we would look out for a lorry or bus and tuck in as close behind as possible so that the policemen wouldn’t get the chance to spot us and stop us. Both tactics served us well, even through the five police stops in the space of 3 hours we experienced further down the line.

It is difficult to describe the Peru we drove through for the next 10 days. Sordid comes close; filthy, stinking, dusty, dry, garbage strewn, poverty stricken, degrading, inhuman, sickening. There was no end to it. Plastic waste covers hundreds of square kilometres. What people do not just chuck out of their hovels that pass for housing, local councils just cart out to the surrounding desert and simply dump in huge heaps. Strong winds then evenly distributes the stuff all over everything. The piles that remain are usually covered in vultures tearing household waste to shreds. Some people are so desperately poor, they actually make shelters in these stinking waste heaps and live in the midst of this appalling degradation.

Pisco and Chincha Alta were coastal towns floored by an 8.0 earthquake in 2007. Driving into and through these places, it was difficult to spot the difference between those areas affected and those unaffected. It all looked like a bombsite. Lima was a cesspit. We were driving the Pan American highway and it passes through Lima’s outskirts. We drove through unbelievable filth and even through a long stretch of 250mm deep liquid sewage. We were very, very lucky not to find ourselves alongside a speed merchant at this point. The hood and sidescreens were down; we barely escaped throwing up. We discovered later that this is not a bad area at all, there is much worse.

Huacho near the coast was horrible, a spot where we found a wonderful hotel tucked out of the way from all this sordid mess. We talked into the night with the woman who ran the place and her young niece who spoke English. We found out a lot about Peru’s problems. They appear to be insurmountable.

Further north along the coast we headed inland to Huaraz, a mecca for mountaineers and climbers, located between the Cordillera Blanca and the Cordillera Negro, two mountain ranges of formidable proportions. We went at the wrong season; the mountain tops were shrouded in cloud. It was not a good experience. By this time we had had a gutful of Peru and Bob had had a gutful of travellers diarrhoea. Roll on Ecuador.

Back to the coast and north again through hotter territory, sugar cane, tropical fruits and the results of adequate irrigation from runoff water from the Andes. Most of the employment seemed to come from agriculture. Most of the huge farms appeared to be foreign owned so revenues would not find their way back to benefit Peru. Trujillo was a more interesting town with a colonial centre of building painted in pastel colours and architecturally interesting. We visited Chan Chan, the site of an adobe imperial city of the Chimu, a civilization besieged by the Incas in 1471.

This whole area of northern Peru is known as the Egypt of South America because of its numerous pre-Inca ruins dating back to years BC. Chiclayo, the next city north is where you stop off to visit Sipan, Tecume, the Mocha pyramids, El Brujo and numerous other adobe ruins. We also visited the Sipan museum where most of the artefacts from the Lord of Sipan’s burial chamber are housed. That is an incredible experience.

To put things in perspective, civilisation A was overtaken by civilization B, the leader and many followers were killed and the remainder of the population enslaved. Then civilization C came along and did to civilization B what B did to A. The last in the line were the Incas who spread from Cusco outwards across southern Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and northern Chile and parts of north-west Argentina. The Incas dominated for 150 years.

Civilizations A, B, C etc all worked on the same principal – that of reciprocity between the individual and between state and people. Religion was all about summer and winter solstices, spring and autumn equinoxes, planting and reaping with a bit of human and animal sacrifice thrown in to ensure good crops and the survival of the people. And then along came the Spanish conquistadores. Their sole and only brief was to loot as much gold as possible to fuel the Spanish war effort back in Europe and to line the pockets of Spanish gentry.

The Spanish, after the republican movement finally kicked them out, left a legacy of stripped assets, a widespread poverty and land degradation rather like scorched earth policy. Peru has never recovered. Such was the Spanish lust for gold that the Incas thought that they ate the stuff. The Incas used gold artefacts for religious and symbolic purposes only; their currency was coca leaves (a natural antidote to altitude sickness). Food was the most important element in life.

The Spanish forgot their promise to release the Inca ruler Atahualpa on payment of a huge ransom of gold. Gold had come in from all corners of the empire to pay for his release but the Spanish murdered him instead. The ransom hoard was never paid to the Spanish; instead it was hidden somewhere in a far-flung corner of the empire. Many people have made it their life’s work looking for this lost city of the Incas and the indescribably valuable stash of gold. It is literally worth a king’s ransom. Some say it is buried somewhere in Ecuador.

Regardless of this history and adobe cities and archaeological excavations, we couldn’t take much more of the poverty. Why does poverty seem to go hand in hand with huge piles of stinking garbage strewn all over the place? We decided to take the inland and previously dodgy border crossing into Ecuador (dodgy as in drug dealer route). We had read too many blogs on the internet of corrupt Peruvian policemen on the main coastal entry point. We had had enough of them as well. Our inland route took us through even worse territory. I do not ever want to see urban vultures again, or sewage running across dirt roads. We were now in sub-tropical wet season territory so the fetid stink was overpowering. The bridge across to Ecuador was a wonderful sight.

PS Do not allow what you read here to put you off a possible trip to Cusco and Machu Pichu. That part of Peru is fine and worth a trip. The remainder – make sure you have all the vaccinations, pills and potions, and leave all pre-conceptions of normal behind you. It is not a holiday, it is an experience.

PPS Since I wrote this part 9, northern Peru has been subjected to torrential rain that has left the river Machala in flood and huge numbers of people in northern Peru wading through dirty water. There seems to be no end to the misfortunes these people put up with. Hunger and sickness will follow as sure as night follows day.

© 2008 Lynne Douglas

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