Pisco & Nazca

For those of you not familiar with South America (which is probably most of you) these two regions are known for their booze and crazy desert lines respectively. One wonders whether one influenced the other!

We spent a night just south of Pisco on the Paracas Peninsula. Pisco itself is a whole, but the region is famous for making a particular type of brandy wine. Its not all that great by itself, but mixed with egg white and lemon, it tastes okay as a Pisco Sour. Got a bottle but still haven´t touched it yet! From Paracas we took a boat out to the Ballestas Islands, which are a poor man´s Galapagos. The islands produce heaps of guano, which is exported around the globe for fertiliser. We saw lots of sealions, Humboldt penguins, and heaps boobies. Boobies are a type of seabird so don´t be rude! On the edge of the peninsula is a candelabra shaped picture carved into the rock, which no one really knows who created it, why they did, or how they did. Some scientists reckon it has some relation to the lines at Nazca (see below) but I don´t think the Nazcans knew what a candlelabra looked like.

After Pisco, we headed to Nazca to take in the world reknown Nazca Lines. For those who haven´t seen these they can be summed up as a whole heap of pictures carved into the desert. When I post some pictures, you´ll get a better idea. I didn´t think too much about who put them there, why they were there, how they got there, etc and just took them as they were. They were interesting to see from the air and another thing to tick off the South American list. Whether it´s strictly legal or not, I got to fly the plane for a few minutes, which can´t have been a bad thing cause we all made it back alive.

Following the flight over the lines we checked out a local necropolis which housed a whole heap of mummies from a pre-Nazca culture. Archeaologists have uncovered a number of undisturbed mummies that are housed in museum in Lima, but the ones on display in the tombs are mostly those that had been found on the surface as they had been disturbed by the ever present South American graverobber (although in this case not by the greedy Spanish conquistador variety). No photos of the tombed mummies in keeping with my respect for the dead theme, although I did get some snaps of the mummies in the nearby museum. It´s a thin line I know.

Now that I have ticked Pisco and Nazca off my list I don´t think I will need to come back to this part of the world. Nazca is even more of a dustbowl hole than that of Pisco, although the redeeming feature of Nazca was that the restaurant we went to for dinner did a delicious lomo saltado (in beef not yucky alpaca) which is a local speciality. It pretty much looks like beef in black sauce as you would cook Chinese style, with some peppers and onions thrown in for good measure.