Nazca, Peru

Overnight bus from Arequipa to Nazca. I take another night time cold med to help me sleep since I’m still very sick and sorely need rest. I awake on the bus in the early morning just before we arrive in Nazca to find that I’ve lost hearing in my left ear. And I feel like death. I taxi it to the hostel and sadly, my room isn’t yet available. I sit in the grubby common area feeling like someone has stuffed rusty steel wool into my sinuses and throat and the rest of me has been used as a punching bag . Not good. In fact, not only not good, but significantly worse than yesterday. I finally decide it’s time to put Peruvian medical practitioners to the test and ask the front desk if they can refer me to an English-speaking doctor.

The front desk calls in to someone, hangs up, and then tells me that I should show up at the following address. The doctor can see me right now. Right. Onward.

I start walking through Nazca for the first time. The morning light seems garish, brash, and insidious and it’s compounded by a town that is dry desert. Not pretty desert, but the kind of desert that seems incapable of sustaining life, that’s devoid of anything beautiful or useful. As I shuffle along the dirt street, I feel like I’m trapped in some kind of sinister Salvadore Dali landscape. I finally find the clinic and achingly pull myself up the stairs.

I’m met by 20 babies and toddlers with their parents – lots of rowdiness and lots of screaming and crying. OK, I’m in a pediatrician’s office. I check in at the front desk. We sort out the inevitable language barrier confusion with makeshift sign language and get the successful point where we all understand that I’m here to see this particular doctor who speaks some English. Unfortunately, he apparently isn’t in the office yet. I sit and wait while the wee ones clamber around me, heightening the surrealist state in which I’m already helplessly swirling.

The doctor arrives. He shakes my hand and then immediately disappears with a great grandmother and her entire family into the examination room. How they all fit in there while the doctor is carrying on an examination, I have no idea.

The next hour is more of the same… wee monkeys screaming as they get shots or crying as they fall and go boom on their bums or have a toy stolen from them. Some sit quietly. One looks at me and smiles and we play a bit of peek-a-boo. The examination room containing the entire family is busy, great grandsons sneak in and out, sons and daughters leave and come re-enter. It’s like Grand Central Station in there.

The heat begins to become oppressive and all the activity begins to grate on my already fragile state. I wait for almost an hour.

Finally, the family files out, one after the other, like too many clowns out of a tiny car. The doctor beckons me in to an office that was even tinier than I thought it would be. Wait, how did all those people fit in there?

I sit at his wee desk and he asks me questions about how I feel in very broken Spanglish. After weighing me, taking my temperature, and looking in my ears, he promptly tells me I have an ear infection and writes me scrips for five separate medications. I ask him if I can go up in the plane that will take me up above the Nazca lines so I can see them in their full glory. “No,” and a grave shake of the head was the simple response. Dammit. The only reason to come to Nazca is to see the Nazca lines and the only good way to see the Nazca lines is from an airplane, dammit. Dammit.

To fill you in, I’ll let Wikipedia do the talking:

“The Nazca Lines are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. They were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. The high, arid plateau stretches more than 80 kilometres (50 mi) between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana about 400 km south of Lima. Although some local geoglyphs resemble Paracas motifs, scholars believe the Nazca Lines were created by the Nazca culture between 400 and 650 AD. The hundreds of individual figures range in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, fish, sharks,orcas, llamas, and lizards.”

I have to say, I was pretty excited to see these. Travel plans don’t always work out, as I’m painfully aware of at this point.

Back to my story…

So I ask about the doctor about the meds and apparently, at least two of them have nothing to do with my symptoms. Ummm, ok. Off I go to the pharmacists in the sweltering heat in the business hub of this dirty dusty diesel-fumed town to get my various pills. I feel like hell.

South America is funny in that retail businesses are set up similar to what I experienced in socialist Eastern Europe when I lived there. Meaning, you don’t just ask the person at the counter for something, and then they get it, and then you pay them. It goes something like this…

I visit one counter and ask the attendant for help. He points me to another person behind a window. I go to the window and give the woman my scrips. She looks at them and tallies up the total and I pay her. She prints a receipt and stamps it before giving it to me and also hands me back my scrips. She points me to another counter and another person. This person looks at the scrips and my stamped receipt and retrieves my scrips from the shelves. She then bags them and staples them up and hands me back my scrips, my bag of pills, and my stamped receipt. She then points me to another person at another counter. I go there and he looks at my bag (to make sure it’s stapled?), looks at my scrips from the doctor, looks at my receipt with the stamp, and indicates that I’m now free to go. Not efficient but I guess it employs a lot of people.

I finally make it back to the hostel. I feel exhausted and it’s only 11:30am. I make it to my room, which is a barren unfriendly place, like a monastic cell… or prison cell. At least I’m alone and can try and rest without people filing in and out, like in a dorm. For the rest of the day, I lay in bed, watching videos on YouTube and TED talk after TED talk. I read Dracula. I stared out the single window at the top corner of the stuffy room. I did this until dark, and when I got hungry enough, I ventured out again into Nazca.

The central square, where all the action is, was bustling with tourists, families out for a stroll, and upstart teenagers clustered in groups snickering and gigging. I found a quiet little place and actually had the first veggie stir fry with rice that I’ve had since I left home. It felt the sweet, sweet nutrition being absorbed into my body. It’s amazing how good veggies are after you’ve pretty much eaten mostly white bread and sugar for nearly three months.

I shambled back to the depressing hostel again after dinner and watched more TED talks before dropping off to sleep.

I awoke the next morning still feeling like my head was filled with rusted out steel wool and my body was run over by a truck. Like many times on this trip, there was no way I was going to let intense personal discomfort or a high likelihood of certain death stop me from moving forward with at least some revised edition of my travel plans. So I can’t go up in an airplane? Then I’m going to take the bus to the mirador (tower) out in the middle of nowhere and climb that thing and see whatever it is I can see of the Nazca lines. Here’s what I got to see:

Yup, that’s it. It took me a five sole cab ride, a 15-minute wait at the bus terminal, a 30-minute ride to the mirador, and a three-minute climb up the mirador. I looked at it and took a few pictures. Five minutes later, I descended the mirador and sat for another 25 minutes waiting for the bus back to Nazca where I got my pack out of storage and immediately boarded another bus headed for Ica and then a taxi to my final next destination, Huacachina.

So far, none of the meds I got were making me feel any better.

A few hours later, I rolled into Ica and promptly caught a taxi to Huacachina, a tiny oasis town outside of the bustling metro area of Ica.