| Jeff Poulter & Graham Tillotson: 25th September 2004 |
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Nazca
No trip through South America could possibly be justified without a visit to Nazca and its lines, made infamous (to me, at any rate) by the notorious Von Daniken book "Chariot of the Gods". It's best the see both the lines and the famous desert drawings at early morning with the light as low as possible so that they stand out in, er, their best light. Thus we rose at 6.00, found no breakfast anywhere, and were duly met at the appointed hour of 7.00 by the guide who informed us that the weather was too misty to see anything and the earliest flight would be at 9:00. So we finally breakfasted and arrived at the tiny little airport at 8.00.
Biggles lives on !
The tarmac was littered with small high-winged monoplanes about the size
of a London cab but with rather less seating capacity. When, at 9.30 we
climbed aboard our plane we found that it had six seats including the pilot.
Biggles sat up front with smart tie and epaulet's and gunned the suped-up
VW engine (well, Lycoming, actually) to its maximum 3750 revs and off we
took. Hey, I thought, this is fun. And it was until we came upon the first
desert drawing after ten minutes or so. Biggles informed us that he would
fly 360 degrees on one bank and 360 on the other so that those seated on
both sides of the plane would have a good view. To do this, of course,
required the plane to bank at nigh on 90 degrees and hold a tight circle.
I realized before the first rotation was complete that I was going to be
in trouble, sickwise. The counter turn confirmed the fact that most of
my stomach would soon be looking to do a runner. There were only a dozen
more figures to fly around, 24 more ninety-degree banked turns. After the
third I gave up looking through the viewfinder of my camera (a) because
I couldn't see anything anyway and (b) because it immediately brought on
overwhelming nausea. Then the Dutch girl in the front seat threw up. I
concentrated hard on the dashboard of the aircraft and, after half an hour
which seemed like several days I could see that we were descending towards
solid terra firma. I just about got out of the plane, digestion intact
but it was a close thing. (No, I don't know the Spanish for 'air sickness
pill', neither does my dictionary and it is almost impossible to mime in
a farmacia without the whole shop doubling up with laughter.) When we got
back to the hotel, I fell asleep for a couple of hours and still didn't
feel right for most of the day. Wimp, me.
High Voltage !
In the afternoon I set out to buy a compact, energy saving lamp first having
boned up on my electrical Spanish vocabulary. This is because the extension
lead, socket and bulb we bought in Mexico has proved invaluable to illuminate
dozens of hotel room erstwhile lit by 15w glimmers. But Central America
had been 110v and South America, so far, is 250v. I discovered this when
I plugged in our soldering iron the re-solder one of the radio cables (for
the umpteenth time) and, within minutes, it glowed red. The penny thus
dropped. I found a bulb, plugged it in and, bingo!, we could see every
cobweb in the room.
The next task was to find a vacuum flask on the basis that crossing the Andes would be unlikely to manifest two things: warmth and coffee. So we decided to take our own hot water in the flask and use the plentiful supply of tea bags that Flip had bought out on her visit to San Allende. Our biggest problem was to persuade whoever was to fill the flask that the water needed to be hot, very hot. Muy, muy calilente, hervidindo, per favor. Not that it did much good: hot does not feature strongly in the Peruvian lexicon.
Jeff 25.09.04 |
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