Back to Nazca

You really need to click on this pic and look at it in large format. It´s the Plaza de Armas in Nazca.
The town is in the middle of a desert, and the highest mountain on the left is pure sand.

It´s 10 a.m. Tuesday morning and Nazca´s Plaza de Armas is well attended. Every town has a variety of this plaza, and seats in the shade are hard to come by after noon. A little later, around 4 p.m., food vendors come out in droves. Mostly drinks, slurpee type things and ice cream. And tourists come out too, and take their pics and crank out some pretty prose just so they post the pics. It´s a cycle.


The aqueduct was built between 300 B.C. and 500 A.D., and is one of series that brings water to Nazca.

Went on a little tour, for $10, arranged by the Nazca hotel in which a guy who speaks no English takes a few foreigners out and explains how these aqueducts work. Lucky for us, a California woman, the shortest one in the picture, did a pretty good job of translating. Apparently, some folks who weren´t exactly Incan dug trenches from mountain water supplies to the town, and built these aqueducts maybe 100, 150 feet apart, all along the trenches, shored up a top to the trenches and then covered them back up. The aqueducts provide a means of evaporation from the water flowing through the trench, and this keeps the water flowing cleanly. And the size of the aqueducts relates to the height of the land at that site. Where the land was lower, the aqueduct was smaller, where the land rose, as here, the aqueduct had to be deeper. It´s either true or this Cali lady didn´t hablas a lick and was feeding us a line.


A planted, farmed field of cactus. It´s a kind of food I´ve yet to personally encounter.

First, I never knew Peru had a desert. But cactus farms? And they´re all over the place. They also grow oranges and cotton. Now, the big national quandary is whether to import chicken -- the demand is outgrowing the production of chicken, though I think anyone awake at 6 a.m. anywhere in Peru would find that hard to buy. Anyway, I think pollo (poi-yo) is so major a part of the diet down here, it´s become kind of the national dish/animal, and importing it is causing discomfort. I´ll update when the strikes break out.