Finishing my travels in Peru left me with a choice. I was intrigued by the country’s Amazon basin and would have gone there were it not for the fact that, at the time, it seemed to be raining every day. Instead, I chose to travel Peru’s South Coast from north to south, ending in the city of Arequipa. The amazon route remained the road not taken.
Saturday, March 2. I began exploring the coast with a bus from Lima to the town of Paracas. While no stranger to long-distance bus travel, in this one, operated by the company Cruz del Sur, I experienced a level of luxury totally unfamiliar to me. First, my heavy suitcase was checked and tagged, as at an airport. My air-conditioned window seat, wider and with plenty of leg room was more comfortable than on a plane, and a privacy curtain separated me from my seatmate. I couldn’t have asked for more.
The ride to Paracas lasted a bit over three-and-a-half-hours. Once we left Lima’s sprawl, the countryside was grim. Bare brown hills and desert made up much of it. The one-story buildings along the roadside were of the poorest construction, and many were abandoned. There was very little commercial activity. Fortunately, the freeway was in good condition, and we sped along smoothly until the last bit when we left the divided highway and drove toward the sea.
Paracas is a peninsula whose beach town is El Chaco. Kay had booked me into Casa Paracas run by a man named Nelson, who seemed to do everything. My room on the top floor next to the roof terrace, where breakfast was served, was large enough but furnished with only a bed and two side tables. The bathroom had a rain shower and a vanity surface. Everything was clean, and the air conditioner worked well.
Settled in, I went out for dinner. The hotel was close to a boardwalk lined with shops, restaurants, and bars. Nelson recommended the restaurant Nautilus that I found immediately. It had an interesting menu and prompt service. I ordered grilled sole and fried yucca. The white house wine was refreshingly crisp and tasty.
Beyond the short, busy boardwalk was a beach and a harbor with many small boats.
Checking my email, I sadly learned that an important friend from our literary society had died that morning. In another email, a friend from college days alluded to a bad bout of Covid and said he had given up driving. Allan’s health was deteriorating; we were all coming apart in one way or another.
The following day, I took it easy. I signed up for a boat tour to the Islas Ballestas, the main excursion from Paracas. At midday, I wandered around the village and finally sat in a restaurant where I ordered a plate of tequeños, which are fried breaded cheese sticks. My order came with twelve and a bowl of guacamole to dip them in.
While I sat, urchins came by. One who might have been eight years old had been dancing in front of the restaurant to some recorded music whose source I couldn’t determine. I gave him a couple of coins. Then, a tiny boy appeared holding a small basket filled with paper wrappers of chewable candy. The tot couldn’t have been more than three or four. I gave him a couple of coins and took one of his candy wrappers. We’ve seen it before, but it always makes me sad that the poor send their very young children out to beg and perform for coins.
March 4. Walking around the village of El Chaco, I wondered at the signs advertising Baño y Dulcha (toilet and shower). I paid two soles to use one of these public toilets this morning having to go quickly. But what about the shower? Who are those who need one?
That morning, my boat tour to the islands was scheduled for 8 o’clock, and since breakfast at the Casa Paracas didn’t begin until 8, I needed to find something on the street, which was very quiet at 7 in the morning. I did find a man who was just setting up his cart and sold me a cup of sugared coffee and a sandwich containing, I think, a piece of breaded and fried fish. It was good enough.
Shortly before 8, the man who had sold me the boat ride met me in front of my hotel and walked me to where a long line of people was waiting. He gave me a ticket to board the open-sided boat that held about forty passengers and was powered by two very large Japanese outboard motors.
Our trip out to the islands began along the desert Paracas Peninsula to the point where we stopped to admire a mysterious figure on the sandy side of a hill called the Paracas Candlestick. It has existed for a long time, and no one is sure who created it or why. Like the famous Nazca Lines further south that I would see later, this figure had not been effaced by blowing sand.
The Islas Ballestas, which are really the rocky tops of a mountain range that has otherwise disappeared, emerge from the sea about twelve kilometers from shore. They are uninhabited other than by thousands of sea birds, most of which seemed to be red-billed Inca terns.
There were also pelicans larger than I had seen elsewhere.
The base of the largest island that we circled had been eroded by the sea and hollowed out to the extent that archways formed letting us look through to the sea on the far side. The rocky surface of the island was white, the result of layers of guano deposited by thousands of birds over time.
Most interesting to most of us was the colony of sea lions sunning themselves on a tiny beach. There must have been twenty-five at least and most were inert. One young one was moving itself awkwardly by means of its flippers. Sea lions have smooth skin and tiny ear flaps. On the return to town, the boat stopped at a floating buoy on which four more sea lions rested. In this case, we were able to approach them very closely.
I was back in town and free by 10:30. For the rest of the day, I spoke to Kay, read things about where I would go next, and sampled a Peruvian dish called a causa, a kind of mini casserole filled, in my case, with a salad of langoustine and mayonnaise sandwiched between two layers of mashed potatoes. It was garnished on top with the haves of a tiny egg and sliced black olives. The causa looked very pretty sitting on an unusual-shaped plate, and I was sorry not to have had my phone handy to photograph it.
I’d been taking my meals at Nautilus. Dinner that evening was lomo saltado, another Peruvian dish of pieces of beef cooked with sliced onions and sweet pepper and served with white rice and potatoes that had been deep fried but were not exactly French fries.
My final note of the day concerns the music I’d been hearing. Last evening, a live band performed on the large bandstand on the boardwalk a couple of hundred meters from the restaurant. The sound was very loud and the music, to my ears, insipid. I’d yet to hear real rock music that had any of what I might call soul. Tonight, three men and three women performed Spanish music that was rhythmic, loud, and more satisfying than last evening’s.
The following day was a disappointment. I was driven a good distance to a spot named Huacachina. It is a desert oasis with a small body of water that the locals called a lake surrounded by palm trees and towering hills of sand on three sides. The lake is perhaps one hundred meters wide and twice as long. In spite of its small size, there were two companies renting paddle boats that no one was using.
After lunch, I found a driver to take me fifteen minutes to the small city of Ica whose most memorable sight was its Park of the Witches, containing sculpted characters labeled Money Witch, Natural Witch, etc.
There were also smaller fauns with male bodies and cloven hoofs. The place was strange, and I wondered how it had come to be.
Back at Huacachina, I had to wait two hours before my scheduled ride back to Paracas would leave. I was bored and pissed by the time I finally got back to Paracas and a late diner of spaghetti Bolognese at Nautilus while listening to the evening’s live music booming on the boardwalk.
March 6. I left Paracas for the town of Nazca. It should have been a simple, sit-on-the-bus kind of day, and it was up to a certain point. This time on the Cruz del Sur, I opted to sit on what the company calls the primero piso, a small group of premium seats below the regular seats above. I sat in the first seat inside the door that gave me easy access to a tiny toilet outside.
We left shortly after 10:45 and for three hours made good time. I stayed awake and was dismayed by the amount of rubbish along the roadside. People had dumped loads, and it was ugly. It says a lot about the mentality of the people and the authorities that seemed not to have cleaned it up or prevented it in the first place.
Much of what we passed was desert, and there were abandoned structures near the road. At other times, we passed what I took to be houses, small, low buildings of various constructions that housed people. These were very poor-looking dwellings, many in bad shape. A few places had dwellings made of woven plant fibers that had been made into sheets and used as wall and roof coverings. I saw nothing inspiring.
We entered a range of low hills and mountains, and at about 1:30, the bus stopped. From the window I looked down the curving highway at a long line of motionless trucks ahead of us. The wait until there was movement seemed terribly long, and I passed the time reading a story by Henry James. When the trucks moved again, it was only for a short distance before another long wait. This went on for a long time, and no one seemed to know the cause. There were no announcements.
After a long while, a man who had been sitting across the aisle behind me approached and asked if I spoke French. He had been speaking Spanish to others and said he didn’t speak English. He introduced himself as Jean-Marie. He was in his 70s and had been married to a Peruvian woman for many years. They lived just outside of Paris near the Porte des Lilas. He had come many times to Peru with his wife to visit family in Lima. At first, he told me that the blockage was caused by a miners’ strike, but that turned out not to be true. Instead, a bit of road was being repaved in a small town that we came to at last. In the West and in Turkey, there would have been workers stationed at the ends of the work zone who would have stopped traffic and let vehicles through in an alternating fashion. That way, the wait would have been shorter. There was no such mechanism there, another indication of the kind of country I was in.
Finally, we arrived at Nazca hours behind schedule. Fortunately, the Hotel Alegria that Nelson had found for me was close to the bus station, so I pulled my case to it and checked in. It was much less expensive than the hotels I had stayed in recently, and the room was smaller.
In short order, I was able to buy an overflight of the Nazca Lines for the next morning, and a bus ticket for my onward journey to Arequipa later in the day. Of the two choices available, I picked 10 o’clock in the evening, thinking that I could sleep in my comfortable seat during the ten-hour ride, which would get me in early the next day. Jean-Marie told me that Arequipa was the prettiest town in Peru, so my expectations were high.
I asked for the name of the best restaurant in Nazca and found it along the main street a few blocks from the hotel. Not having eaten since my light breakfast in Paracas, I ate a good meal: a plate with a pork filet, two tasty chorizo sausages, fried potatoes, and salad. I drank a glass of red wine and finished my meal with a bowl of three flavors of ice cream.
March 7. It was my day to fly over the Nazca desert and view the mysterious lines and animal geoglyphs created in prehistoric times by no one knows who. They are remnants of some pre-Inca civilization and were documented for the first time by North American scientist Paul Kosok only in 1939.
An old man (likely younger than me) drove me to the Maria Reiche Airport where I was met by a representative of Alas Peruanas Airlines, one of several that fly the curious in small planes over the desert to view what are referred to as the Nazca Lines.
I didn’t know why, but the operation seemed disorganized. I was told we were waiting for others who didn’t show, and finally I was told that another person and me would be taken aloft in a smaller plane. The other person turned out to be a French woman named Pauline who sat next to me in the rear seat of a single engine Cessna 120.
We were welcomed by the co-pilot who, with a paper map, showed us the route we would fly and the animal geoglyphs we would glimpse.
I read that the designs were made by removing the top layer of reddish-brown iron-oxide pebbles to reveal the yellow-grey subsoil. They are large and together the lines and glyphs cover an area of 50 square kilometers. They have been studied by scientists and many others, and it is generally believed that they had served some religious function. In 1994 they were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
At 9 that evening, I pulled my case across the street to the Cruz del Sur station, checked my heavy case, and joined a bunch of others, backpackers mostly, in the waiting room.
I had seat number 4 on the first floor where I watched others to learn how to stow my back pack and make myself comfortable. The bus left shortly after 10, and we were all asleep quickly.
The night passed, and it was only in the morning when the sun came up and I could see the ugly rocky landscape littered on the roadside with years of trash and glass bottles, that I was bothered. For some reason, it took a long time to reach and enter Arequipa where the morning traffic was chaotic.
In that city, Cruz del Sur doesn’t have its own terminal and instead deposited us at the large bus station somewhere on the edge of town. I found an authorized taxi driven by a guy who had no idea where the Hotel Fundador was located. An English-speaking man, who was there to tout his tour service, told the driver where it was.
Finally, I had arrived at Arequipa, the second most populated city in Peru from where I hoped to be able to visit Colca Canyon, the second deepest in the world.
My visit to Arequipa and Colca Canyon continues in Peru Part 4.