Pachacamac - A Place of Contrasts

     Today had a lot of contrasts for me. It started regularly enough for me - I had breakfast with my host family, my morning commute, and then classes. I thought my trip to Pachacamac would be a regular trip as well. It would be a stop on the road with plenty of tourists and trinket sellers, with precious little historical value left to show. Thankfully, I was wrong.

     The middle of my day was a stark contrast to its start - we left Miraflores and departed from Lima's outskirt to its coastal core. After a good drive on our bus, we arrived at Pachacamac. The line between it and the the rest of the city was both clear and stark. The site was hundreds of acres of sand and rock topped with brooding temples and paths which towered over the much smaller buildings and greenery around it. There were almost no other tourists besides my group, and precious few people at all apart from a few guards and our two tour guides. Despite being in the middle of one of the world's largest cities, I felt a profound sense of isolation; it was as if we had simply driven to another planet.
     The contrasts did not stop there. Despite the apparent aridity of the ruins and the silence of the stones, one could smell water wafting in from the Pacific fog, and the smell of cars and smoke from the still very much living city around it. Our knowledgeable and well spoken guide Danielle revealed even greater contrasts with every step we took. The Pachacamac site had been used as a place of worship and governance for almost 5000 years, and had been occupied by dozens of civilizations and societies, while the city surrounding it is not even 500 years old at the time of this writing. It was very much an island of antiquity surrounded by a young, modern city. 

     By the end of the tour, I had a newfound appreciation for Lima. Despite its relatively recent founding, its culture is not monolithic by any stretch of the imagination. It had absorbed all kinds of legacies from its native people, the Spanish, and others into a mix that seems contradictory at first glance, but is awe inspiring once you really get to know it.