Land of the Dead

One of the good things about this trip is that it’s thrown up many pleasant surprises along the way, making it much more than just achieving the “must do list” that I talked about yesterday. Well, today was one of those pleasant surprise days.

I’d watched a documentary on British TV a couple of years ago about perfectly preserved mummies in the South American desert, and was surprised to find whilst here that the documentary had been about Chauchilla Cemetery, just on the outskirts of Nazca. Mandy, having suffered my junkie-esque obsession with accumulating useless facts through documentaries for countless years, didn’t stand a hope in hell of stopping me from doing it (but then again she didn’t try to, knowing how much I wanted to see it).

Rather surprisingly, we found ourselves having a private tour. We were the only ones booked on the tour for today so, rather than occupy a minibus with just us on it, we were picked up and driven off in a battered old car, with just the driver and the tour guide (who we will called Egbert for now as we didn’t get his name!) for company.

And in yet another example of how we are the luckiest people on earth, with respect to the weather, it was a really cool morning with thick mist cover. The perfect weather for visiting and walking around a desert and the worst weather possible for seeing the Nazca Lines. In fact, had we done the Nazca Lines and Chauchilla Cemetery the other way around we would have missed out on seeing the lines, as the flights had been grounded today such was the lack of visibility!

First stop was a ceramics factory,

where we were told by Egbert the significance of some of the ancient paintings on the pottery. For example this image,

means “Monkey head coming out of snake with other heads and fishes”. Gives you a real insight into the history of the area doesn’t it!

We were then taken into the workshop area, where a man demonstrated how the pottery was made, using the same methods today as they had in pre-Incan times.

Obviously, the tour then concluded with a demonstration of “non-obligatory items for sale”. Luckily though, this was no “Beijing Silk/ Jade factory moment” (See Day 6 of the blog for details!) and the merchandise was affordable and good quality.

Happily swinging our essential holiday purchase, we got back into our rust bucket private limousine and continued onwards towards Chauchilla, veering off the sealed road onto a desert sand track fairly shortly afterwards.

After navigating the various bumps of the seven km track, the driver pulled up and we were at Chauchilla Cemetery. Paying our five Nuevo Soles entrance fee each, Egbert led us first to a small enclosed area, in which were the remains of one of the more preserved mummies in the area.

Egbert had been part of the group who took us to the airport yesterday, and both yesterday and the start of today he seemed ill at ease in his role. But, going around Chauchilla Cemetery with him, he seemed to really come into his own and you could sense he had a real enthusiasm for the subject. This started in the small enclosed area, where, after he’d told us a few basic facts about the mummy (such as it was one of the Nazca tribe and pre-dated the Inca civilisation), he proceeded to show us some photos of the landscape on the walls and explain why the geology of the area had preserved the Nazca Lines. He explained that the high iron content in the top layer of the land, while enabling lines to be drawn because of the contrast with the layer below also protected the lines from the sun by reflecting much of the UV rays back. He even demonstrated outside to us how the lines had been created.

We then started to look around the cemetery proper. A quite large area, each of the excavated graves was covered with a small, open shelter and a path led through to each of these in a circuit.

And so started a, slightly macabre, tour of lots and lots of skeletons!

There were some really fascinating insights provided by Egbert, such as the fact that the Nazca tribe practised trepanning; a method of removing part of the skull of people with head injuries to relieve the pressure and save their lives. This sort of advanced medical procedure took centuries to reach Western Medicine! There was evidence of this as well in one of the skulls we saw.

Another thing he mentioned was that the Nazca tribe practised skull deformation, elongating the skulls of senior families of the tribe by binding ropes around their heads in infancy to distinguish them from other tribes people. And again, the evidence for this was in one of the skulls.

By now, Egbert had totally relaxed with us, joking that one of his ancestors buried here was Bob Marley

and that another was an American Football player!

He was much more chatty with us, and we compared the weather in Nazca (it rains for half an hour each year!) with that of Manchester (where it’s dry for half an hour each year)! Which explains why the Nazca Lines are still there after hundreds of years and why the grass in our garden at home will probably be twenty feet high by now!

The mummies were quite fascinating to see, with much of the hair and original clothing still intact,

and the setting was completely other-worldly with the rust-coloured hills in the background and miles upon miles of desert scenery in every direction.

On finishing the last tomb, our driver picked us back up again and it was back to the desert track,

back to the hotel,

and back to another leisurely afternoon, which we’re becoming quite accustomed to!

We rounded off another great day in Nazca with a repeat performance of the brilliant meal we’d had two days ago. And then it was back to packing for the journey back to Lima tomorrow; our final place before returning home.

Almost every web site you look at for Nazca recommends that you stay for one night, see the lines the next day, and then get the hell out of there. How wrong they are! We’ve had three brilliant, relaxing and interesting days here and wish it could be more. There are lots more things we could do if we stayed longer, and it’s such an amazing area of the world.

But, after six months of endless time stretching out in front of us, time on this trip is now a commodity we’re running out of. After today, we have two more nights sleep left before we catch our plane back home.

There’s going to be tears!!