Pyramids, Part II

Our next destination was Pachacamac, a site with sixteen pyramids that was about forty minutes away. Monica drove us through several towns on the outskirts of Lima. This part of Peru is perpetually overcast, but we were blessed with sunshine for most of our trip despite an unfortunate weather forecast that promised rain everyday. Rain in Lima is just a brief sprinkling and then it goes back to being gray and arid. A truck in front of us sprayed water on the grass along the highway.

The stretches of sand all of a sudden turned into multitudes of rainbow shacks built one on top of the other, shantytowns comparable to the favelas in Brazil. I took a lot of pictures of them, but it's hard to convey the magnitude of these metropolises and how suddenly they would crop up.

When we arrived at Pachacamac, there was a little lawn where llamas and alpacas grazed. I imagine they were employed there as nature's cuddliest lawnmowers. I stepped over the barriers and attempted to approach the alpaca, but I was stopped by the woman in the ticket booth. I had a wish to embrace an alpaca while I was in Peru and my wish was not fulfilled.

Snow white angel.

There was a market outside of the museum with vendors selling baskets, jewelry, and handbags. One man was whittling a gourd with a pocketknife. He sold intricately carved gourds that were hollowed out into boxes. Some of them were birds with beads rattling inside them, little maracas. We considered buying some gourd boxes, but worried that they would be damaged in our suitcases. The artist was quick to interject. He picked up one of his creations, smashed it on the pavement, and then presented it to us unharmed, demonstrating the indestructible nature of his folk art product. We bought three of his indestructible gourds. (One gourd is in my apartment next to a Wandering Jew, filled with white chocolate Lindt truffles. The second is Upstate on a bookshelf with dozens of polished mineral eggs and a Lord of the Rings elven sword. There is also an owl-shaped maraca gourd on a sailboat somewhere off the coast of California.)

We walked through the collection of artifacts in the museum. The ceramic figures on display had cartoonish facial expressions. The Incas made jewelry and other decorations out of bright pink shells that were more valuable to them than gold.

Pre-Columbian statement necklace.

Knotted ropes that seemed to be necklaces were mounted on the walls, but Monica pointed out that they were actually writing. For a moment, this blew my mind. What messages were being communicated through the particular arrangement of knots on a rope? Upon closer inspection of the nearby description of the artifacts, it was a sort of bill for products and services.

When our guide was ready, we drove to the first of the ruins. Our guide, a Peruvian woman with very angular features, wore a beige outfit and a beige adventuring hat. She coordinated perfectly with the sand. We drove from one ruin to the next. In the car, Dave and I ravenously devoured a package of salty corn kernels and juicy peaches. Lunch is the main-event-meal in Peru and we had not had ours yet.

The first ruin was a pre-Incan palace where a community of beautiful women made crafts for the earth god Pachacamac. The most beautiful of the beautiful women - they could not have any moles - were happily sacrificed to the earth god.

There were a total of sixteen pyramids at this site, created by different cultures because the region kept changing hands and changing religions. The largest was The Temple of the Sun, an enormous beige fortress built by the Incas that was once painted with bright murals. We ascended the path to the temple, which is still being excavated.

Walking around the temple, you could see the shantytowns in the desert, an oasis of grass, and two islands standing in the ocean. Those islands have a myth: The big island is a beautiful princess who was too proud to marry anyone. The little island is her baby. A mischievous god impregnated her with a piece of fruit filled with his seed and then humiliated her in front of the other gods. She flung herself and her baby into the ocean.

Click here for even more pyramids.

Pyramids, Part I

Our first adventure in Lima was a quest for Incan ruins. Dave and I set out early in the morning with our friends Monica and Moniquita and drove to a pyramid called Huallamarca, nestled in the middle of the historical, old-money houses of the San Isidro district. The dusty archaeological site rose up in the middle of the city, right across from a bank and a small parking lot.

There weren't any guides at this archaeological site, so a security guard escorted us through the museum and pyramid in exchange for a small tip. There was an entire room devoted to the importance of gourds, with gourd bowls, urns, and masks.

So excited.

In the next room, we found an Incan mummy excavated from the pyramid. She was hunched over, like she was cowering in fear of the icy breath of death.

The glamorous afterlife.

That is just how the Incas buried their dead, curled up in a fetal position inside of giant gourds rather than lying down with crossed arms, like Egyptian pharaohs. Then the bodies were hidden like Easter eggs in pyramids for posterity, with all of their pots and bowls. This particular mummy had signs of a fractured arm that had been healed with advanced Incan medicine. She had been treated for rheumatoid arthritis. I was surprised to see a full head of natural hair crowning her skull.

Incan mummies like Russian nesting dolls full of bones.

Then we all climbed the pyramid to see small excavations on the surface. Tents covered more pear-shaped mummies with startled expressions on their gourd masks. Some of them had shaggy wigs like rag dolls.

From the top, we had a panoramic view of Lima and all of its continuous rumbling construction. Sometimes it seemed like Lima's population was entirely made up of jackhammers. Walking up and down the pyramid, my sneakers went from black to a dusty graphite gray.

I noticed that every archaeological site was guarded by an elderly, skeletal canine with a sweater and a laughable haircut. We saw one at each site, but this guy is my favorite.

Click here to read Pyramids, Part II.

Fruits I Have Nibbled

• The Softest and Creamiest of All Avocados
• Papaya, blended into a juicy pulp with warm water
• One small, fuzzy peach
• An orange banana, not quite so creamy as the ones I am familiar with, but still delicious within its own context.
• Several very small "apple bananas"
• A cherimoya, which has a delicate skin of mermaid scales and white, floral flesh like pineapple but not so sour. Just as you find in a watermelon, there are molar chipping black seeds that you must spit into your bowl.
• The avocado's crumbly spinster cousin, lucuma, which is far tastier as a pastry filling or an ice cream
• A strange orange fruit that looks apple-esque on its deceptive surface, but when you break open its hard shell the inside is white and fibrous like the gritty substance beneath the peel of an orange and it looks like it might segment like an orange until you penetrate the white layer and discover an egg sack full of gray eyeballs, sticky like fish eggs and clustered like pomegranate seeds. This fruit cannot even be fully understood by means of comparison or even metaphor.
• A perfect, piney mango.

Panama

Before I left for Lima, my friend at work brought me a picture of Machu Picchu from a travel brochure. She went there years ago before they regulated the number of visitors and hikers. She stayed in a hotel just outside of the ruins. When she looked out the window of her hotel room, Machu Picchu was right there. In bed she stared wide-eyed out the window thinking, That’s Machu Picchu.

She said, “The best part is when you’re standing on the ruins looking at the Andes all around you and you’re the same person as you were at home. You’re the same person, but you’re standing in the middle of an ancient civilization.”

Today I had this same feeling, but I was still flying over South America. From the plane, Dave and I could see the mounds of vegetation protruding from the ocean, the long fishing boats, and the fog hanging over the water. All of a sudden it occurred to me that I was in Panama. How did this happen?

These are the things I know about Panama. One: There is a certain kind of hat that people in Panama are known for. Two: When I was eight years old, my grandpa had a lady friend visit our house and she was from Panama. He had emphysema, so she may have been one of his nurses. He liked to flirt with them and give them his money. This one was a woman who was about my height – I was small for my age – and she had a baby. The baby looked huge in her tiny arms. I was bewildered that a woman so small could make a baby at all.

We got off the plane. The inside of the airport was humid and we were dressed for frigid New York temperatures.

“We’re in Panama!” I said.

Airports, Dave observed, are just malls that you fly in and out of. While we wandered around looking for our terminal, pretty ladies with stacks of advertisements tried to bully us into sampling Paris Hilton’s perfume. We passed shops purveying the quintessential Panama hats and Rolex watches and duty-free shops selling expensive liquor. Who would buy a Rolex watch on impulse?

“Let’s play the find-the-most-expensive-item-in-the-store game – oh, there it is,” Dave said, indicating a liquor aptly named Louis the Fourteenth. It came in its own locking travel trunk, s it should for $3,400.

“It probably tastes okay,” Dave said.

Dave looked for a lunch that would make up for the sardine tin of pasta he ate on the plane. There were Flying Dogs – apparently what people in Panama call the hot dog – and Quizno’s and McDonalds and Cinnabon. We probably passed five different Cinnabon stands. All Dave wanted was a sandwich.

At the terminal, where the passengers loitered around the desk, bored and waiting to board, the announcement for our flight came. The voice on the loudspeaker told us important information about boarding but did not switch into English. We realized that no one was going to translate anything for us at this point.

I never thought I would ever be in Panama, even for a layover. After graduation I despaired, wondering if my adventuring days were numbered and if I would spend the next twenty years working a number of menial, minimum wage jobs to pay off my education. Sometimes I feel like my brain is turning to the consistency of a deep chowder. As I was listening to this language that might as well be a secret code, my ears perked up. I felt the familiar feeling of the unfamiliar. It occurred to me that I was same person in a different hemisphere.