Don't Stop Believing

After our great sand boarding adventures this morning, we returned to our hostel to take much needed showers and pack up. We headed out for lunch at the nearby wineries.

The winery we chose had a lovely shaded patio. We order our food before embarking on our education walk. Pancho took us past several rows of grapes to the vats where they make the wine and pisco. He showed us a huge cement vat where each March there is a festival to squish all the grapes. I hoped they cleaned the vats before then. He showed us pictures and told us how people dance around and mash the grapes with their bare feet. I wished I could have been there for that.

Next, he showed us another huge cement vat where the wine and pisco are drained into tall ceramic pots. The old reddish-brown pots were about up to my shoulders and were fat the top and narrow at the bottom. Clearly, these were the traditional jars that were used because many looked extremely worn. Some had to be more than 100 years old.

After the wine fermented in the huge pots, it was poured into a deep hole with a huge kettle at the bottom. I am still not entirely sure of this process, but I gathered that this was now the making pisco part. The liquid would then be heated with a hug fire underneath and allowed to cool and drain through a long skinny tube. We walked around to a little dirt floor room where there was a faucet for the pisco to drain. Above the faucet there was big cross covered with flowers in order to bring a blessing on the whole process. Pancho explained that the liquid would would come out in three different levels. The first that would come out would be blue, and then the liquid would be clear. This clear liquid is the liquid that could be drunk as pisco. Last, it becomes blue again and that would be thrown away.

Finally, we got to try some of this pisco. Our pisco "somalie" handed us tiny clear plastic cups. First, a pisco sour mix (minus the froathy egg whites)-delicious...a little like a margarita. Next, pure pisco (the good stuff though)-yuck! Are you sure you didn't just serve me rubbing alcohol? I'd hate to try the bad stuff. Next, "Peruvian Bailey's" pisco mixed with milk and sugar among some other things-again, delicious! Some sweet wine next and I found out why Peru is not known for their wine-no good. Last, a delicious pecan covered in carmel and chocolate called a tejas--right up my alley!

We enjoyed our lunch on the patio on our yellow table cloth covered table and after a few purchases we headed out. Before leaving Ica though we drove down a bumpy dirt road to a "witch village." All of us expecting extremely weird things, we were a little disappointed.

First stop at the witch village was an old palm tree where three local boys who were maybe about 9 or 10 scrambled to be our guides. Pancho chose one of them and he began telling us about this "seven-headed" tree. The other two boys sat back clearly looking jealous and disgruntled that this first boy got chosen.

It was quite a weird sight as the huge tree had several different "stalks" each growing in different directions. A few of them had even grown under ground only to reemerge to make that part of the tree look like a serpent coming out of the water. There was an elaborate legend which was somewhat hard to decipher as Pancho was translating what the boy said and adding his own ideas in his faulty English. Something about a witch jumping from the top of the old palm tree and maybe a curse somewhere in there. The end of the legend required a lot of imagination. The boy was pointing out different "animals" that parts of the tree looked like. And when I say a lot of imagination, I mean a lot.

Last stop was a "shaman/healer". The outside of his shop was painted with bright colors advertising his services, and while it didn't seem so authentic, I had to give him the benefit of the doubt because he had to make a living too. We entered the "shop" and it was a dark room with a dirt floor. I was frightened by the bookcase containing two rows about about 10 human skulls. The was one candle burning in front of the skull shelf on the floor and a vase of flowers. Creeeepy. I looked around another low table covered with all sorts of jars, shells, carved wooden sticks, potions, small figurines and who knows what else. There was also a doorway leading to another room that had a thin cloth covering the entrance. I wondered what was back there. Finally, I saw the "shaman" and my ever growing doubts were confirmed. This guy was wearing jeans, a button down shirt, and white tennis shoes. What kind of shaman was this? He didn't look like any kind of shaman I had ever pictured. While I guess Peruvian people don't stop believing just because of what he was wearing, I sure did.

We piled back into our van, passing on the option for him to tell our future, and settled in for our two hour drive to Nazca. We watched the sunset over the hazy sand dunes while we drove and it was beautiful.

Don't Stop Believing, Journey