Olives And Long Roads

We got some advice from a campground owner up the coast to drive south from Nazca and not turn inland from the coast to go direct to Cuzco. Don Francisco the mango farmer said it was a much more interesting drive with fewer mountain climbs and hairpin descents. Most travelers in fact do what we had planned to do and drive inland from Nazca and they in fact report a dreary repetitive switch back across southern Peru. 

We both enjoyed the PanAmerican down the coast as the highway skirted the ocean and passed some surprising rock and sand formations  on a smooth easy road. And yes, there were some long straightaways too, which are inevitable in deserts. And then you come across an oasis, in this case the village of Yauca. 

There is a campground here on iOverlander and it was five o’clock in the evening so obviously we timed it right, clever us and by the way we are not afraid to admit we like olives so our fortunes were looking up. Doña Sonia campground owner and olive saleswoman: 

I don’t want to cause consternation but we have met people on our travels who -gasp - don’t like olives. Yes I know, I wanted to shield you from this awful truth but we have discovered that olives are polarizing.  Rusty is indifferent to them but he was just happy to be out of the van.

We were handed crackers and spoons right there by the side of the highway and we dug in, while olives mashed olives olive blossom honey and on and on.  We bought twenty something bucks worth. We have to eat them before we enter Chile next month as the customs there are strict and don’t allow fruits vegetables meats nuts or honey. Yup; you can’t import honey to Chile; the overland madness never ceases. 

Layne checked out every jar and flavor and had me haul the overweight loot to GANNET2.

The open gate marked the spot where we planned to sleep. The cost was negligible, eleven bucks, and it wasn’t fancy but it was safe. I don’t get a great vibe for parking off the highway in Peru and we don’t wild camp in this country. I like having easy access to cheap campgrounds or gas stations for safe overnight parking as we travel. 

The door on the left is the vast spacious bathroom clean and with a cold shower only, on a 60 degree evening I waited till morning for my blast of cold wake up water. 

We had an all too brief conversation with “Stan from Hunan” whose real name is Fung Hao from China ( the big one, not Taiwan) who has been cycling South America for 15 months and is pedaling north toward Colombia. 

The ground was level enough and the olive trees are huge benefiting from rich river silt and lots of irrigation. 

Rusty enjoyed wandering here under the cool gray inversion layer from the Pacific Ocean. I’ve never seen such gigantic olive trees. 

Fung Hao, whose English was impeccable, decided to find accommodation elsewhere as he was  aching for a hot shower and who can blame him after pedaling 55 miles. He was surprised to hear we knew of Hunan through the fame of its spicy cooking and he also pointed out with some pride it was the birth place of Mao Tse Dong which struck me a bit like puffing yourself up if you came from Joe Stalin’s home town but what I remember and what he’s learned in school about history probably  diverges a bit. He set off, the young social media film maker to find hot water. Bummer he was interesting to talk to. 

The next morning it was back on the road with an eight hour drive to Arequipa and we knew we weren’t going to get there in one day. 

Most overlanders we’ve met describe the coast road as boring but we enjoyed it. The highway was smooth and pothole free and the scenery was stunning, Layne described it as Big Sur on steroids. First we squoze out of the bottleneck campground entrance and managed to harm no olives in the squeeze. 

“Sand OnThe Road.” Yup. 

This is off season on the coast, winter, under cold gray skies and vacation homes are empty and stores are closed. I guess security cameras make sense. 

We like off season as it’s dry and rain brings rock falls and mud and being stuck in the van all day of which we enjoyed too much in Central America. But the skies are all gray in winter which can appear dreary I suppose. 

The overcast and 60 degree day reminded us of coastal California. 

The truck took the hairpin wide (above) and despite the oncoming car (below) never changed his driving style. 

In Peru what Mexicans call “topes” (speed bumps) they call suspension breakers. Not all of them are easily seen and they are annoying at the entrance and exit to villages. 

We stopped to pick up drinking water in one village where I was surprised to see an electric car getting charged.  We put ten gallons in the tank and off we went. They were a pretty cheerful bunch too. We find southern Peru much more friendly than the dour north. 

All the parked trucks indicated it was getting on for lunch time and weirdly enough Layne found a recommendation for a fish restaurant in iOverlander. 

Big Sur is considered one of the memorable drives in North America. Here we had 300 miles of curvy empty highway perched a few hundred feet over the Pacific and not a foreigner in sight. 

And when finally we stopped for lunch the overcast burned off like magic and it was a sunny afternoon. 

The usual soup, shrimp in this case, for first course, juice to drink and to go boxes to cope with our three dollar lunch. 

Fried fish beans and rice and conversation with some truck drivers on their way to Arequipa. 

The van fascinated them and we found ourselves back in the land of the cheerfully friendly and curious. The truck drivers work twenty four hours driving from Lima, arriving at Arequipa at nine at night, unloading, loading and driving back north. 

The road wound up /a bit, down a bit, inland, crossed fertile deltas and got a bit foggy and a bit sunny by turns. 

There are lots of fuel tankers and propane trucks on this road. 

At one point we had to pull over to let a wide heavy load go by after we got flagged down by an escort car. The truck at the back was connected by a pole to the trailer to push and act as an extra brake. I’d never seen that before. 

The white van wouldn’t back up to let the truck complete the turn. We sat and watched the circus. 

This is the freedom of not having liability laws. I often wonder if people who protest about regulations could really handle living like this but we will never know. 

I have absolutely no idea what the rocks were spelling out in Peruvian. 

This is a dusty empty countryside. 

But there it was. Weird. 

A small gas station in Majes two hours from Arequipa was our spot for the night. Traffic died away and we are self contained with good insulation and our own toilet so all we need is a safe spot to park. This fit the bill for a night. Soon Rusty was snoring in his bed. 

Nazca Lines

I have come to enjoy the places in Peru not exalted online, the ancient monuments we discover almost by accident on our travels by van. Think of Sipan, Chan Chan and Áspero, evocative slices of history, monuments to pre Inca civilizations developing in isolation on this remote Pacific Coast, places never before heard of that predate the more famous monuments of the Middle East. We’ve seen them and following along on our iconoclastic path you have too. Not many outsiders or Peruvians have.

And then there are the Nazca Lines mysterious symbols etched into a remote inhospitable corner of coastal Peru a few hours south of Lima. They were seen and ignored by Conquistadors crossing the mountains and looking down into the valley. They were seen in the age of flight in the early 20th century and in the 1970s they were the subject of preposterous alien theories which we heard of alright. It was as though impossible to believe brown people 2500 years ago could create outsized art in the desert so we attributed these designs to aliens on a desert vacation. 

Archeologists have figured them out and attribute to them   no  practical significance but suggest they are one more example of religious symbolism to communicate with the gods they hoped ruled their lives.

By carbon dating wooden pegs found at the location sciebtists know when the lines were built, a period of  five hundred years either side of the birth of Christ. They planted pegs and scribed arcs with string or drew straight lines removing the dark pebbles and creating light colored lines a few inches deep. 

Other than that no one knows anything about them so if you want to believe aliens came here to draw pictures of what they found, you are welcome to, but what none of us can deny is their fame thanks to the looney alien speculation. 

That people lived out here boggles the mind. 

That’s the original smaller observation tower now closed. 

It’s an odd spot to do such elaborate art work which is invisible from the ground. And then to run the PanAmerican Highway through the middle of it seems odder still. 

Loud telephone conversations intrude on any attempt to meditate or puzzle out or just feel these places. 

The foreigner checking souvenirs. His name was Stefano and he lives near Venice. He looked like Cary Grant (with the inevitable modern  reusable water bottle) in North by Northwest waiting for a bus. We extracted him from his fate and gave him a lift back to his hotel in Nazca. 

We spent half an hour here and determined we wanted to take a flight to see more.

We loaded Stefano the Silent in the back and he was grateful for the ride and that it was free which struck me as odd as a bus ticket for a half hour journey couldn’t cost that much.  We travel high on the hog. He was interested to see how much gas cost us and how far we could drive on $70 of regular (about 300 miles). 

We dropped him off and set our course for the airport on the south side of town planning to spend $70 each for a thirty minute flight. 

The hustle was on as we saw planes taxiing in continuation as we drove up. A man in an orange vest flagged us down and that was our doom. He started in on how we had to hurry as the plane was leaving - hurry hurry- and so forth. 

Then when we got to the building the hurry ceased and the price increases began. $600 for a plane to ourselves. Or two hundred dollars to share a six seater. And surcharges and I don’t know what. We looked at each other and got up. “Special price,” he yelped. Suddenly discounts appeared but we put our heads down and trotted back to the safety of our lockable home. He followed yelling and sent a woman to talk to us but I got in gear and left. 

And that is why we did not fly over the lines. 

We met a Venezuelan refugee who sold us empanadas for lunch with no hustle. 

But we skipped the famous sand dunes at Huacachina where we had wanted to ride a dune buggy as the hustle was tremendous and there was no secure parking for GANNET2 away from the tours, the crowds, and the pimps selling whatever they thought you wanted. We were not leaving  Rusty in our home unprotected on the street filled with humans on the make. We fled. 

We’ve enjoyed sand dunes in the peace and serenity of a US national park and the more I travel the more I look forward to going home and wild camping in our peaceful wilderness at home. 

We kept on driving toward Arequipa the colonial city off the coast but on the southern route to Cusco the former Inca capital. I’m growing less sure I want to deal with Machu Picchu.