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.

Perusing

All I want to do is leave the country. I have been daydreaming about it often since the last time I left the country. On a weekly basis, I torment all of those around me with stories of Romani kids and cheese-toting anarchists in the Czech Republic. Then I think about having another adventure. This all-consuming wanderlust often manifests itself in the form of looking at pictures of rainbow buildings in Argentina or teaching myself useful Polish phrases or reading an entire website about Bulgarian cuisine while at work. My workplace environment only enables me by making it extremely easy for me to spend an entire shift reading about Bulgarian cuisine.

Finally, some real progress. Dave and I are going to Peru in November. I will have someplace useful to channel this energy. Now here is a photo montage of pictures from Google Images!

Ruins!

Alpacas!

Chocolate!

Ceviche!

Wild camelids!

Peru is one country that Dave and I both can agree on. I’ve wanted to visit Machu Picchu since I was a wee beastie. I saw Matt Lauer traveling there on the morning news while eating my Fruity Pebbles and I thought, “Yes. I shall go there.” Last year I met some kids from Lima and got a favorable impression of that city as well. Did you know it is the Gastronomy Capital of the Americas? I’m not sure who has the privilege of awarding such titles, but I intend to find out if it is well-deserved. Peru is a great exporter of cocoa beans, so I can’t help but imagine chocolate gushing from the alleys like floodwater. And if there is good chocolate then I could easily live off of that for ten days (or until I get a chocolate hangover).

But chocolate addictions aside, I may need to start eating fish again to be able to survive in Lima. My last few experiences with fish have involved unparalleled bellyaches. Peru is famous for ceviche, which I tried with Dave several years ago. Instead of cooking the fish, it is prepared with lemon juice and spices. The lemon juice is supposed to kill the bacteria and parasites. We went to a restaurant near our college and ordered some sort of pink-fish-ceviche. It was delicious, but we both felt very weird during the car ride home. My whole body felt loopy. I didn’t know it at the time, but the feelings of loopy-ness were just hallucinations brought on by food poisoning.

I told a friend from Lima about my ceviche experience. “You shouldn't be eating that outside of Peru,” she gently chided.

One night after I came home from work, Dave and I stitched together the skeleton of the whole adventure in one big marathon. Dave found some not-so-expensive round trip plain tickets; I arranged our accommodations. We tried to buy our tickets to Machu Picchu ahead of time. Apparently, it is not so difficult to buy the tickets in Cusco the night before or the morning of the trip.

Huayna Picchu, the misty and impressive mountain peak that one sees in all pictures of the ruins, is a little harder to tackle spontaneously. You need to buy the tickets in a package with Machu Picchu. Only 400 people are allowed to climb it a day and you have to go through Peru’s government website to book it ahead of time. Peru’s website is notoriously screwy, however, so we had no luck in procuring any tickets ahead of time. Officially, it only takes Visa cards. In reality it does not even take Visa cards.

We also missed out on buying our lunch ahead of time from the only buffet-style restaurant at the peak of this precious ancient treasure. I suppose we will just bring sandwiches.

I began to consider what sort of footwear one would wear for the climb. Normally I would wear my barefoot shoes for hiking, but I wondered if something more heavy-duty would be necessary. Google provided us with heaps of wisdom. Some people climbed it in sneakers, others in Teva sandals. One person recommended that we wear two pairs of socks. He said that a friend recommended that he wear two pairs of socks and, though he can no longer remember the excellent reason, he now wears two pairs of socks every day.

While we have the skeleton of the trip pieced together, there are still other important things that need to be addressed. I need to bring my level of Spanish to at least conversational-caveman level in the next two months. I can hardly remember anything from my Rosetta Stone lessons from last year, but I really hope to see some women eating rice in Peru so I can make intelligent remarks. And at least one alpaca, which I will ardently embrace.