Michael Batson

Nazca is a dusty town located on the Pan-American Highway between Peru’s second city Arequipa and the capital Lima.  People usually pass through on their way from one city to the other. Just outside town is located one of the mysteries of the world, the Nazca Lines. The Nazca Lines are a series of ancient hieroglyphic drawings and symbols in the desert and designated a UNESCOO World Heritage Site since 1994.

It was a rough ride on the bus down from Arequipa. Sitting all night on a Peruvian bus with diarrhoea and no toilet is not fun. To keep my mind distracted I sat directly behind the driver. It was an old Greyhound bus from the States, still with everything written in English. The door lever was operated by hand whenever passengers alighted. I figured a few life threatening traffic episodes would serve well to keep my mind off how awful I felt. I was right.

Juan Carlos was a local tout looking for tourists for his family’s hotel. Exhausted I acquiesced and followed him wearily along Nazca’s main street. The hotel was basic, clean and secure. It had hot water and the sun was shining. After a shower I sat outside in the courtyard admiring the geraniums.

The Nazca culture was “discovered” by a German archaeologist named Max Uhle initially through a series of ceramics. I say discovered for as is usually the case with such claims, they often take a somewhat Eurocentric view largely ignoring the locals, who probably knew of their existence all along.

The Nazca culture had as its main capital the Ceremonial City of Cahuachi, some 28 kilometres outside the modern city of Nazca. According to archaeologists, the Nazca culture thrived for over a century from 500 BC to around 600 AD.

It is thought the Nazca people chose the lower section of the valley due to the abundance of natural springs used for irrigation, a theory hard to believe staring out at the parched landscape without a drop of water to be seen.

The Nazca culture is credited with making the famous Nazca Lines. In the Nazca desert have been recorded over 300 hundreds figures and over 10,000 lines has been recorded, covering a huge area of 525 square kilometres.

Alternate theories as to the origins of the Lines include hot air balloons, and Erich von Daniken of Chariots of the Gods fame, proposed that the lines form some part of an ancient runway for extraterrestrial life forms.

The Nazca Lines were first spotted by one of Peru’s first airlines when flying from Lima to Arequipa in the 1920’s, sort of like giant crop circles only without the crops. Pilots who flew the route noticed the many lines crisscrossing the desert in all directions, reports that eventually sparked media interest.

In the 1920s and 1930s archaeologists began visiting the area from as far afield as America and Europe. However, it was not until 1939 that the Nazca Lines properly when an American archaeologist began repeated flights over the desert mapping all the images, after being drawn by reports of ancient irrigation systems located in the Nazca Valley. This work was continued by a German researcher, Maria Reiche, who was to devote her life to studying and preserving the lines.

Reiche lives comfortably in Nazca in a local hotel paid for by the Peruvian government as reward for a lifetime of research that has put Nazca on the map and made much historical information available. Not to mention income from the numbers of tourists now flocking to the area.

I went to meet with Reiche with a travelling couple from Europe but was told she was ill. Instead I met her sister, Rinah, who reported her sibling elderly (so was she) and frail, but hoped she would soon be well again. Rinah looked much like her sister’s photo hanging in the main foyer of the air-conditioned hotel, tall and angular, her face devoid of much flesh. Her grey hair almost white was drawn back in a pony tail away from her face. She wore glasses and possessed piercing eyes, almost mesmeric.

She was well versed in the history of the region, though her sister she said, was the real expert. She spoke in English and was happy to take questions. She asked the other couple their profession and the man replied “waiter.” The privilege of the West, that a waiter can generate enough discretionary income to afford a trip to such a far flung place.

Reiche produced copies of one of her sister’s books on Naca, “Mystery on the Desert” or Secreto de la Pampa in Spanish, and Geheimnis der Wuste in her native German, and signed the copy “To Michael” which I purchased at small cost.

It’s so dry in this region and rainfall almost unheard of that vehicles come without wipers. The taxi was a bright orange Volkswagen Beetle, courtesy of the continent’s industrial powerhouse, Brazil, which along with Mexico was still producing the car of the people.

The taxi driver was relaxed and even let me drive on the return journey. Driving on the opposite of the road wasn’t as difficult I had feared, though the VW needed a new clutch.

The wipers had been removed. Outside town are the graves of the descendants of modern Nazcans. I say graves for these consist of rock piles, the bodies are visible sitting on the ground. Due to the dry, windless and stable climate, and its isolation, the corpses much like the famous lines themselves have, for the most part been preserved. They are so preserved in fact, that after several hundred years, the deceased still wear their skin complete with distinguishable tattoos, and their hair.

Amazing then that robbers and vandals haven’t descended upon them in some ghoulish quest for souvenirs.

The famous lines themselves are best viewed from the air. At Nazca’s tiny airport planes con be chartered for an hour to grant a bird’s eye view of the lines. I climbed into a Piper Cherokee with the pilot a large Peruvian of African descent. Such was the state of my stomach, I was more concerned with lasting the course of the flight without incident, than I was about mechanical failure.

The lines are a wonderful sight. Maria Reiche refers to them in her book as documentations of an ancient calendar-science of the classical period of the Nazca culture. The question posed by the lines, she ponders, is how these people transferred geometric forms and representative figure from one scale to another, producing sometimes giant shapes?

The lines themselves are shallow designs made in the ground by removing the ubiquitous reddish pebbles and uncovering the whitish ground beneath. Hundreds are simple lines or geometric shapes; more than seventy are designs of animal, bird, fish or human figures. The largest figures are over 200 metres across.

Given there is a complete lack of written records, the truth behind the lines can only be investigated through careful and laborious fieldwork, something Reiche devoted her life to.

The lines can also be investigated from a viewing platform but the sight is no way as revealing as taking the flight, money well spent.

Juan Carlos offered the use of a pool in a disused hotel. Hot and dry from a day in the Peruvian desert I was keen. Unfortunately disused also meant unclean and by the colour of the water, I wasn’t going in anytime soon. 

Later that night I met Jack. Jack was a New Zealander who hadn’t been home for sometime. He was distinguished looking man aged about 70, with a mane of silver hair and matching goatee. He reminded me of George Adamson on safari from “Born Free”.

Jack had been living in town for sometime and in Peru even longer. We sat with his “wife” in the shell of his restaurant, which was yet to get up and running, but he hoped this would be soon. They’d been problems with getting the build finished. Finding staff was another issue. “They keep nicking all the teaspoons” he lamented. His wife was an attractive local woman in her forties, a widow she explained with a grown-up family. She was very happy with Jack as he didn’t drink or abuse her, which is something I gathered her dear departed had been prone to.

Jack announced other perils of life in Peru. Recently they had been burgled at home but the police he said, had refused to help without payment of “petrol money”, a bribe. “In the end we just let it go,” said Jack. “I couldn’t be bothered.”

The local police station, I had noticed earlier that day was a single level building indistinguishable for all the others, save for the large brick wall directly outside its otherwise rather inconspicuous entrance.

This I was told, was to prevent attack from the street, largely expected from urban guerillas, though in Peru these tend to operate more in rural regions. So in case the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) or MRTA (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) decided to pull up outside and shoot a rocket-propelled grenade at the local constabulary, this construct and others like it throughout the country, had been devised in self-defence.

They wished me a bon voyage. “Say hello to New Zealand for me” said Jack. I got the impression that happy in exile, he wasn’t planning on returning anytime soon.