This little Peruvian shaman was now escorting us to his tiny museum a few minutes down the road. His scent of not bathing for a few days wafted toward me and I wondered how he suckered us into this. We arrived at his museum and looked around at the small, dusty collection of various bones, shark teeth, shards of pottery, and the worst taxidermy I had ever seen.
We saw a disheveled puma lunging at us with parts of its tan fur falling off and large black condor with its tattered wings spread wide. Its wingspan was more than my outstretched arms and its sharp beak and talons made me glad it was frozen in time. We also saw mummified human heads with hair and old cloth headbands still attached. Weird! This tiny museum also had mummified macaws (feathers were still surprisingly colorful), a dog, a monkey, and some babies. Ewww, strange. It made me interested to visit a nearby cemetery with more mummies that I had been reading about. I pictured the strange dried up mummies I had seen in Guanajuato Mexico many years ago.
The shaman then announced that he was going to perform some sort of ritual on us. He was going to balance our energies. Now this shaman (unlike the one yesterday) looked how a real shaman should look. He was a few inches shorter than me with rich brown skin and black eyes and shoulder-length, slightly messy hair. He wore a red cloth top and shorts, necklaces of long teeth and bones, and leather sandals. His headband had two large feathers sticking up from the front. After putting his wooden shaman walking stick/staff down, he picked up a bottle of orange liquid from his little table of supplies. We stood in a circle in the back of the museum (now, as I'm writing, I wonder what on earth someone would have thought had they walked in during this ritual).
The healer started by pouring some orange liquid out of the plastic water bottle (this container was the one part that didn't seem so "authentic") into his hands. He would then dab some on our foreheads, necks and palms. I didn't want him to touch my neck (and I guess I was a little skeptical of having the liquid put on my face as well). My turn came and I closed my eyes and inhaled the odor of strong smelling liquid, but couldn't place what it actually smelled like (aftershave, maybe?). Shaman man then instructed us to turn our palms to face the people's next to us in the circle and hold them a few inches apart. We had to close our eyes and he told us to feel the energy passing around the circle. He gently shook a rattle from our heads to the back of our knees as he walked around the outside of the circle. I could feel the warmth of the energy from the hands of the people next to me...of course, that could have also been slight burn of the unknown liquid that had been slathered on my hands. The medicine man finished the ceremony by dabbing some eucalyptus oil on the center of our foreheads. We all felt more calm and centered.
Energies balanced we loaded up the van and I insisted we drive the 30 minutes down the road to the cemetery to find some more bizarre mummies. Eucalyptus filled the van.
Chauchilla Cemetery looked like an expanse of sand and rocks. There were no grave markers or much of anything to signify anything was really there. Wait, there was a small blue sign and a hut where a woman was selling various sodas and chips. There were also a few huts spread between a path lined by painted white rocks. Apparently, most of the graves had been ransacked by grave robbers, so the site wasn't in as good of condition as it perhaps could have been.
Pancho lead us among the big pits that have been cleared and set up with bones and "mummies." While quite an unsual sight, many of the mummies were a pile of something (I guess we were supposed to assume the body, but I suspected something more like rock
s, sand or maybe some bones) covered in tattered old cloth with a skull placed on top. It was pretty gross. We walked among the different pits and gawked at each different one. Some of the skulls still had long black hair attached. We are talking feet and feet of hair. Yuck! Pancho even joked that one of the pits had Rastafarian mummies and sure enough these three mummies did appear to have long black dreadlocks.After being sufficiently grossed out by the mummies, we got back in our van and drove back down the bumpy, sandy road. Pancho was driving particularly fast, but I wasn't sure why. We had some lunch in Nazca and insisted on choosing the restaurant. While Pancho knew a lot about travel in Peru, he did not seem to have the best skill at choosing good restaurants. We had nightmares about the chain Peruvian TGI Friday's-esque restaurant he dropped us off at on Friday night.
Three hours back to our next stop in seaside Paracas. long the way, Elizabeth and I insisted we stop at the huge super store Plaza Vea in Ica which had first visited yesterday. At Plaza Vea "todo custa menos" (everything costs less), so you can imagine this super store like an clean oasis in the dustiness of the rest of our trip. The two of us were now hooked on these great treats called Kiwilocos which are chocolate (more accurately, rather, some chocolate substitute) covered crisps (like Rice Krispies) with a shockingly low calorie count and we needed to stock up. Elizabeth and I feared we could not get them in Ayacucho, so we bought out the store. All 14 of the 100 gram packs that the store had were now ours (minus one that we were guilted into giving to a girl in our group who wanted one pack). We discussed the potentially lucrative exporting options to the United States and vowed to investigate more later. (Elizabeth since emailed the company to ask about this, but only received a bounce back message saying that it wasn't a real email address...however, we have not lost hope in the business opportunity).
We arrived in Paracas, I enjoyed a long hot shower, and went to bed.
Finder's Keepers, Pat Green
No comments:
Post a Comment