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Today we took an all day tour with Haku Tours. The morning portion of the tour was at an ancient site called Pachacamac. This city was founded by the Huari (Wari) in the Lurin River Valley. When the Inca empire expanded, they conquered the Pachacamac and absorbed them into the Inca civilization. The Inca maintained Pachacamac as a religious shrine and allowed their priests to continue functioning independently of the Inca priesthood. This included the oracle, whom the Inca presumably consulted. The Inca built five additional buildings, including a temple to the sun on the main square. Our guide described to us how Pachacamac was an important religious center. Wealthy pilgrims would visit the area, leaving rich gifts in exchange for blessings and status. Unfortunately, the religous rites included human sacrifice; our guide told us how a whole school of young women was raised at Pachacamac, only to be sacrificed on various ceremonial occasions. Although most of the tombs at Pachacamac had long since been looted, they did find some graves of these women, some with the cotton garrotes still wrapped around their necks. We walked through the museum at Pachacamac, and then our guide showed us around the ruins. We climbed up to the Sun Temple, which was once painted red and shimmered in the sunlight because the Inca had smashed thousands of sea shells into its sides. We had a big lunch in Lima. Two more tourists joined our small group, increasing our tour size to six people. Our guide then took us through Colonial Lima. He described how damaging the terrorist group the Shining Path had been in the 1980's; Peru's wealthy people fled the country and much of the economy collapsed. It occured to me that since Peru is now so dependent upon tourism, a return of terrorists would be especially devastating to this developing country. The highlight of our afternoon was the tour in an ancient Spanish church. We walked through the grounds, and got a trip down into the catacombs. This church was the only one of the Spanish buildings that had not been destroyed by earthquakes, though our guide did point out a couple of points where the walls were noticably leaning (I thought about that when we were touring the catacombs...) We stopped at a chocolate factory (we have now been to 3 South American nations: Chile, Argentina and Peru, and all three seem to be big lovers of chocolate. I heartily approve!) and then ended our tour in Lima's central square. Because we had such a large lunch, we didn't go out for dinner that night. We went to bed very early, because we had to wake up in the middle of the night to catch the bus down to Nazca. Panorama Photos
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Click on any thumbnail to begin the slide show at that photograph Day 13 Photos
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