Peru (1)

Gate1 Travel – 11 Day Classic Peru wit Nazca Lines

June 19 to 30, 2024

Drive (on interstate, in the dark, and in the rain) to Deland to pick up Joy, drive to Park&Ride, take a van to airport. Flight Orlando to Miami and flight Miami to Lima, Peru. Two flights home Lima to Miami and Miami to Orlando. Drive back to Joy’s and then home.

With Joy and Jane

Tour Guide Edgard Mendivil Figueroa. Teaches history at local college, has been a tour guide for decades. Has wife and five daughters. The pandemic was very hard on this family.

Joy, Jane and I arrived in Lima an hour late at 11 PM. Jane had not booked transport to the hotel, as Joy and I had. It was Jane’s first GATE1 tour and I was remiss in checking her booking. It was too dangerous to get her get a cab alone, so we went nowhere until the driver agreed to take her with us. It cost her $40, but it was worth it.

We gladly slept in, had a leisurely breakfast and set out in the city alone to find the hop-on/hop-off bus.

The girl at the desk told us we would not be able to walk to the city center. It turns out she was looking a 3 women with a total age of 210 and she decided we would never make it. She did not know we each walked an hour every day and work out. So we took a cab for a total of $5.

All paperwork and airport signs told us DO NOT GET IN A CAB THAT IS NOT YELLOW.

Duh, our hotel bellman calls us a cab, an old black one and we jump in. Joy and Jane both assured me that we could easily take he cabbie if he decided to kidnap us. Thankfully, all he wanted was cab fare and a tip.

Lima is at sea level and often can barely been seen due to either air pollution or fog — not sure which.

We stopped at several spots in the city.

The white wire can is for recycling plasic. Ingenious, since you can’t put other trash into it.

Got off at a stop near our hotel. We eventually ate a late lunch here.

This was a pyramid in ill repair from hundreds of years ago. The city was slowly repairing the wall. It was an arena where they did human sacrifice.

I remember or tour guide saying they sacrificed 500 babies; and with a population of only thousands, it was quite a percentage. I wonder if they felt it was worth killing 500 of their children. It seems silly now.

This was the Love Beach with a huge statue of a man and woman embracing. I realize these photos are reduced so you can’t enlarge them to see it clearly. It’s the pink blob.

Even in this photo I stole from the internet has fog!

This was a Catholic Church across the street from our hotel. Peru is 79% Catholic.

A sample of every day items available in a small grocery store. You don’t see some of these in a US grocery.

Fishing is a big industry here and anchovies are number one. But they aren’t the little ones you get for a pizza; they are 12 inches long.

The Lima airport reeked of fish smell from the fish factory during the week. The second time we were at this airport, it didn’t smell since it was Sunday.

This was mind-blowing. There is an INTERNATIONAL airport in Pisco, Peru and as you can see it was ABSOLUTELY EMPTY. Our group of 8 and 2 other couples were the only people here.

No flights are needed except to Nazca where the mysterious lines and animal pictures are seen from the air.

…..Maybe the coca/cocaine trade uses the runways, illegally, at night.

We all had to be weighed because is was only a16 passenger plane and weight distribution makes a big difference.

The Nazca Lines are huge line drawings of animals and people in the Peru Mountains so large that you can only grasp them from the air.

This is a chart of where the geoglyphs, as they are called, are located. The pilot was very good at tipping the plane quite far so we could easily see them on the ground and sides of the mountains.

The designs are just the top 6″ or 12″ layer of sand and gravel removed. The wind blows right over the ruts without removing more sand/gravel and they have remained the same for hundreds of years.

These are some of the theories of the designs. Astronomy, points of agriculture, rites, prayers and festivals.

The best answer I heard was from our tour guide. Whenever the wet season came, the flamingos came. So the natives decided it was the flamingos BRINGING the rains, which nourished their crops. So in order to bring the flamingos, they put meat/food in the ruts of the designs to entice them. Seems reasonable, but why would they bother drawing animals and designs instead of just long lines of ruts?

Peru has MANY things that are explained with the phrase “We just don’t know.” A very unsatisfying answer for me!

We were in the town of Pisco, home of the famous drink, the Pisco Sour. It includes the distilled alcohol, pisco, along with lemon (?) and frothed egg white. We were warned not to drink it due to the possibility of getting sick from the raw egg.

But some defied logic, enjoyed the drink and suffered no consequences.

This trip was Joy’s choice. She especially wanted to see the Nazca Lines and was very excited. Sadly, they sat her in the back seat; she had no view forward and her window was at the top of her shoulder, so in order to see downward, she needed to scooch upward and sit on her jacket. The big vent overhead was freezing her out, but she needed to sit on her coat. She saw only half of the geoglyphs. I would have switched seats with her, but we were so strapped in, I couldn’t bend over far enough to pick up something I dropped on the floor The plane wasn’t too new and I wasn’t sure if we moved around, we might crash.

IT WAS VERY DISHEARTENING for Joy. But we lived, and others shared their photos with us on WHATSAPP.

The noise coming from the old plane was a little disconcerting. The pilot wanted us to see each animal and would bank sharply left and tell us where to look and then bank sharply to the right so the other side of the plane could see it. At some points I looked up into the sky above us. We were almost sideways. Click.

Luckily I had been warned by fellow travelers in Bolivia and I wore a prescription patch to avoid motion sickness.

One fellow traveler threw up into a bag across from Jane. (ugh!)

This is what I took photos of, and didn’t know I had captured any geoglyphs, until I zoomed in closer.

Someone with a better camera cropped these shots. They were clearly monkeys and people and dogs!

Here’s another they called the astronaut. How could the Incas know about astronauts if we hadn’t built an airplane by their time??

I was amazed that people would just build a city in the center of a sand dune!! Those dunes must be quite stable and don’t blow away at the first gust of heavy wind.

….and the certificate. I’m not that impressed to get one, but I’ve gotten several from my flight to see Mt. Everest, a balloon ride over the Egyptian Pyramids and another balloon ride in Thailand.

We then had lunch. This little concert was typical of the flute type instrument they use often. Click.

More to come.

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