Waking up in San Francisco, going to sleep in Lima
It was strange to wake up in San Francisco and to be settling down to sleep in a hostel in Lima, Peru by the end of the day.
I had some reluctance about leaving the cozy cocoon of convenience and security that I had adjusted to again being back in the States, but now that I am here and traveling again, I remember the buzz.
Barely stopping for a breath in Lima I jumped on a bus to Nasca and walked across the street from the bus station at 11pm to the nearest hostal and shook the night watchman awake to get a room. The next day I flew over the famous Nasca lines that have lain more or less unnoticed for 1500 years until pilots started venturing in these parts in the 1930s. In fact, the PanAmerican highway piles right through the drawings. They are pretty unfathomable. My pictures through the window of the plane barely recorded the figures in the sand, but here is one closeup.
We were flying in the same little Cessnas I fly back in Oakland, and I have to say that I was not impressed by our pilot (it´s a hard thing to sit in the right seat as a passenger and watch someone trying to land the plane who you realize is a less competant pilot than you are. I don´t know how flight instructors can stomach it).
At the hostel, I was pounced upon by a local who was enthusiastic to practice his english and get some help translating a list of english expressions. However, it became apparent that he was almost entirely self-taught from browsing the web, and mostly porn sites from what I could tell. This led to a rather limited but colorful vocabulary: 'content no longer exists', 'bubble butt', 'download', 'shemale', etc. It was quite a stretch for my Spanish.
The next day while I was waiting for the bus to Cusco, I visited the mummies in Chauchilla. This is 2000 year old cemetery where the graves have been opened and plundered (nothing unusual about that) but the mummified bodies were left strewn around the desert and have remained remarkably preserved (for decades) by the completely arid environment. In the last few years the bodies have been returned to a few selected graves that are somewhat protected from the elements.
I had some reluctance about leaving the cozy cocoon of convenience and security that I had adjusted to again being back in the States, but now that I am here and traveling again, I remember the buzz.
Barely stopping for a breath in Lima I jumped on a bus to Nasca and walked across the street from the bus station at 11pm to the nearest hostal and shook the night watchman awake to get a room. The next day I flew over the famous Nasca lines that have lain more or less unnoticed for 1500 years until pilots started venturing in these parts in the 1930s. In fact, the PanAmerican highway piles right through the drawings. They are pretty unfathomable. My pictures through the window of the plane barely recorded the figures in the sand, but here is one closeup.
We were flying in the same little Cessnas I fly back in Oakland, and I have to say that I was not impressed by our pilot (it´s a hard thing to sit in the right seat as a passenger and watch someone trying to land the plane who you realize is a less competant pilot than you are. I don´t know how flight instructors can stomach it).
At the hostel, I was pounced upon by a local who was enthusiastic to practice his english and get some help translating a list of english expressions. However, it became apparent that he was almost entirely self-taught from browsing the web, and mostly porn sites from what I could tell. This led to a rather limited but colorful vocabulary: 'content no longer exists', 'bubble butt', 'download', 'shemale', etc. It was quite a stretch for my Spanish.
The next day while I was waiting for the bus to Cusco, I visited the mummies in Chauchilla. This is 2000 year old cemetery where the graves have been opened and plundered (nothing unusual about that) but the mummified bodies were left strewn around the desert and have remained remarkably preserved (for decades) by the completely arid environment. In the last few years the bodies have been returned to a few selected graves that are somewhat protected from the elements.
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