Skulls, a last look at a bird paradise, an oasis, and accountancy

Ah, Peru.  It was pretty delightful.  Our last days in South America were spent in and around the town of Paracas, on the Pacific coast of Peru.  This is our last South American entry finally.  Sigh . . . done with South America. 

On our last morning in Peru, I went on a second boat trip to the Ballestas Islands for one final glimpse of the amazing wildlife.

Famous "candelabra" carved into the mountain ca. 500AD on a nearby island.  Similar to the famous Nazca lines.

Sea lions drape themselves over the rocks, each other -- they look so soft, snuggly and comfortable.  

Turkey vultures are plentiful on the Ballestas -- waiting, hoping for a dead sea lion baby, fetus, mom or placenta.  These are perched on part of the structure in place for the lucrative every 7-year harvesting of the guano produced by the guano cormorant, below. 

Endangered red-legged cormorant.

The dark, seeming-shadow on the left side of the island is thousands of guano cormorants warming in the sun.

  Sweet healthy multitudes.

There's an oasis nestled among the sand dunes in the Peruvian northern extension of the Atacama desert.  The oasis is about 30 miles north of Paracas.  I'd never seen one before.  Not visible in the photos:  dunebuggies crawling like ants over the dunes.  

 

This gull dined on a dead skate -- not easy eating, as they're pretty rubbery when freshly dead.  Gotta shake it around to get little bits off.

This egret was in breeding plumage - these lovely feathers, preferred hat decorations, almost led to their extinction.

Our last afternoon was spent in a little local skull museum in Paracas -- the only skull museum I've ever seen.  It's a one room museum, with a very old, very knowledgeable director/guide who gave us a personal tour of artifacts, mostly skulls displaying intentional cranial deformations.  The Paracas nobility practiced this from about 700 BCE with several different types of uh modification, always done on infants, as the skull and patient are more pliable and compliant then.  They also practiced trepanation (skull cutting, basically) to treat health problems, and remedy head trauma from battle.  These practices didn't always enhance survival odds - of babies or other patients.  

Trepanation performed on a "modified" skull owner.

Elongated, obviously.

A broadened, flattened skull.

Head binding pad, with a picture of how it'd be applied.  Usually stayed in place for at least 6 months, sometimes longer, if the patient was compliant and not dead.

And finally - accounting.  This is the quipu, a knotted alpaca yarn tool used by the Incas for accounting.

This one shows the record keeping in process.                                                                                                                              

And an Inca accountant with a fresh ledger.

Steve, amused by the books.

That we've been "on the road" for 9 months comes as a surprise -- seems like lots of water under the bridge, also seems like it was just a short time ago we were dreaming all this up.  Maybe its because we're so old?  I don't know, but we're enjoying Portland, loosely planning our next adventure which will include Portugal and southern Spain in March/April, then over to the British Isles for the summer.  Rather amazing year, and while there's a wedding in September (Gen's!) that'll bring us back, we're not sure whether we'll be ready to settle down then, or take off in another direction.  It's almost easier in some ways to keep going, rather than face the storage area and have to make a decision about the next chapter.  Yet I think we both long for  normalcy.  And we miss you all in that normalcy!  Two sides to every coin.