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Remembering Pachacamac
It was so long ago, Jorge was using actual film. He shot these three images in succession. It was 2008 or so, and Jorge, Sam and I went to the ruins of Pachacamac, on the coast of Peru, not far from Lima. It is an ancient fortress site that pre-dates the Incas, and as you can tell from these photos, it is very, very dusty. That’s Sam on the left, me in the middle, wearing my mother’s scarf. A Peruvian hairless dog was walking around in a yellow t-shirt. As you walk from one ruins to the next, you stumble on bits of broken preColombian pottery, but you cannot pick…
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Robbers Hold up NatGeo Team at Nasca Hotel (and the place where you don’t want to book a room is…
( Enigmatic geoglyphs in the Nasca desert draw tens of thousands of tourists to southern Peru each year; photo c. RPP)Great timing, criminals in southern Peru. First a Peruvian trucking company diverts 100 tons of UN rice for cold-spell victims to the black market in July. SUNAT seizes three truckloads (32 tons) of hijacked rice in Ica; the rest is still unaccounted for. The rice was intended for malnourished communities in the Puno area, where freezing temperatures have killed more than 433 people this winter. Now armed robbers broke into a Nasca hotel early Friday morning and assaulted members of a National Geographic team filming a documentary on the Nasca lines, making off…
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Lost City of Cloud People Found in Amazon
Here is a fascinating story that just surfaced about the Chachapoyas: An ancient lost city has been discovered in the remote Amazonian rainforest of north-east Peru, archaeologists have announced. The fortified citadel appears to be from the pre-Inca era and may be linked to the country’s legendary ‘Cloud People’. The main encampment comprises circular stone houses overgrown by lush jungle over an area of 12 acres, said archaeologist Benedict Goicochea Perez. The citadel sits atop a chasm that the former inhabitants may have used as a lookout to spy on approaching enemies, she added. Rock paintings cover some of the fortifications, and next to the dwellings are large platforms believed…