Pisco sours are sneaky! They go down all too easily with your freshly grilled fish and scallops, and leave you with furry brain lag the next morning! But I'll go back for more, in a couple of days.
We started the day with a drive to the Julio C. Tello Musem which likes in the Paracas Nature Reserve. The reserve is a pretty large chunk of intertidal coastline that backs onto a larger chunk of desert that was set aside for the protection of migratory birds. But the museum is all about the famous Paracas mummies that had been found in sitting-up positions, wrapped in hand-woven textiles and placed in hollowed out caverns below the desert surface. This area is the northern part of the Atacapa Desert, the driest desert on Earth, and the mummies were preserved in extremely good condition. Once again, the red-haired Paracas people defied the standard descriptors of the black-haired Indians of this land, having paler skin, lighter eyes, different blood types and, of course, the red hair. Our guide ran through his program for school children with us, to identify features of Paracas art, and even old Len got into the spirit of the activity.
The long drive through the alien desert landscape to Nazca (Nasca) was briefly broken up by stops for lunch and refreshment, before we reached the enigmatic Palpa geoglyphs. These are not as well known as the more famous Nasca glyphs, but are in fact much older and made by the Paracas culture some time between 500 BC and 100 AD. They are still to be deciphered.
But we got a taste for
tomorrow's adventure when we arrived at a few Nasca glyphs near the highway - the tree of life, a pair of hands, and the lizard. We'll be flying over the whole plain in the
morning in a 12-seater Cessna. Let's hope the pisco sours don't make an unwanted return!
