Celtic Warriors - Chapter Two
PachaMama
Hola, mis amigos!
Sitting in an altogether more pleasant environment than wwhen we last wrote, sunny fresh, in Machu Picchu Pueblo iin the Andes, at the bottom of the mountain from Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. We've come to the end of our four day hike through the Andes which finished with a 4am rise this morning for the 1 hour 40 minute climb up the gruelling stone steps to the ruined city 500m above. And it was magical, once it stopped spinning! Back down the mounting, with a sense of satisfaction sharply offset by pain, I've now limped into the nearest internet cafe, delighted for the excuse to sit down and rest my aching legs and blistered feet. Of course, I didn't make this mornings climb any easier (whats new???), - celebrating our last night with the rest of the group, 4 Germans two Scots, with the maddest Irishman and the two Scots downing their last Pisco Sours and leaving the nightclub at 3.30am! Hoping to connect to psychiatrists-on-line when I've finished this…
Anyhow, arriving back from the jungle last week, and all clean dry tidy and happy again, we headed off down the coast, to get a feel for the desert area of Peru. The country divides into three distinct areas. The Andean mountains run straight down from top to bottom, where half tthe people, all indigenous, eke out a living in subsistence ffarming. To the East of the mountains is the jungle and Amazon rain forest, with only 6% of the population, all native jungle tribes. Then there's the long (2,500km!!) and very narrow strip down the West side, between the mountains and the sea, which is almost all parched desert, and where the rest of the population, mostly mixed race, and 15% direct spanish descendants (still very much the upper class) live in the major cities and fishing villages.
Our first s off, after hours on the bus down the Panamerica highway , with the sea to our right and the mountains to our left nothing but grey sand all around, was Pisco, home of the nation's no.l drink, the iquitous Pisco Sour, a cocktail of grape brandy, lime juice, bitters and egg white, guaranteed to make you wince and shudder at the first mouthful (every time!), but it grows on you! Next morning we took the boat trip to Las Islas Ballestas, a staggering collection of huge hollowed out rocky islands populated by hundreds of thousands of smelly birds, and countless noisy sealions, a huge contrast to the totally barren shore. These islands, and their neighbours, played a major part in Peru's push for independence in the early 1800s, - when the ruling spanish class, tired of having to pay tribute to Spain, but having lon since stripped the country of its vast inca wealth of gold and silver, realised that there was white gold on the islands ... Birdshite, to be exact (or "guano", to be more proper). The most prized fertiliser in the world, it was then worth lkg of gold for 5 sacks of guano ... and it was over 5m thick!!! Now it's only worth $20 for 60kg, but it's still harvested every 7 years, when it reaches 15cm!
Determined to pack everything possible into the least time, the boat was followed by an hour on a bus and 2 hours across the desert in a collectivo, an old american Dodge Brougham, which looked like it was going to be comfortable until, waiting for a fifth to make up the numbers, she aarrived with a sixth! It wasn't a pleasant journey to Nasca, where we arrived, as we had hoped, in time to fly the Nasca lines that same afternoon. These are a vast collection of lines and shapes, over 2,000 years old, aacross the desert plateau. Huge pictures (the smallest tthe size of a football field) of a Condor in flight, hhumming bird, moll-headed man, huge arrows, and many iintersecting straight lines, running for miles across the ddesert, can only be seen from the air, leading to huge speculation as to who made them, and why. Theories run ffrom the obvious aliens from space theories to anything you ccould care to mention, but they seem pretty sure now that they were designed by the local witchdoctors, or shamen, who are (yes, they're still around) convinced that, high as a kite on a hallucinogenic brew (no, we couldn't get our hands on any…) they fly off to do battle with evil spirits. On their flight ,they thought it would be handy to have pictures of the various animals that would help the whole thing along, and a few arrows to guide their llanding. Looking down at my favourite, the monkey, the wonder was more how, 2,000 years ago, they could have pictured our Shay so accurately. Actually, perhaps a few guiding arrows on the roofs of various houses around Maynooth would be no harm to guide him home on his Saturday night flights either!