PARACAS, PERU
Billed as the 'Poor Man's Galapagos,' this coastal city nearly didn't survive last year's 8.2 earthquake, which destroyed many of the buildings lining the sandy beach and killed 500 people in the region. On a grey fall day the fact that half its buildings have not been repaired - and that its main docks still lean on pillars tilted by the powerful tsunami waves that arrived with the earthquake - give Paracas a spooked feel.
Video link: YouTube: PARACAS BEFORE AND AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE
On the night of the earthquake, a giant tremor sent tourists and villagers out of their rooms. Two hours later, ocean water invaded buildings and reached the streets sending everyone scrambling for the hills.
Angel Miguel Echevarria Salguero, a fisherman, and his wife, Teresa Nunez, now live in a tent with their two teenage children in the highest part of the village.
"We were left in the street," the husband, 41, said pointing to the cracks in his modest home's walls. "The house will collapse."
In a bitterly ironic twist, someone brought a stray penguin to their house. Salguero, who used to work at the national reserve, will now have to return the animal back to its natural home, whose wildlife Salguero hopes will lure tourists back.
 Once home to an ancient civilization called - Paracas - the Galapagos reference comes from the incredible wildlife on the islands just off the coast. Several times a day jet boats race from the docks, filled with orange-life-jacketed tourists, to islands twenty miles offshore for plentiful booby and penguin sightings.
Just south of town, 'carved' into the sand hillside is a remnant of its earliest civilizations, a geoglyph that looks to be a giant, 400-foot tall candelabra - or trident or pitchfork.
"EL CANDELABRO" is similar to the NAZCA LINES, a series of geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert, a high arid plateau stretching more than fifty miles between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana. They are believed to have been created by the Nazca culture between 200 BC and AD 700. There are hundreds of individual figures, ranging in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, fish, sharks, llamas, and lizards.
The lines are shallow designs in the ground where the reddish pebbles that cover the surrounding landscape have been removed, revealing the whitish earth underneath. Hundreds are simple lines or geometric shapes, and more than seventy are natural or human figures. The largest are over six hundred feet across. Scholars differ in interpreting what the lines were for but generally ascribe religious significance to them. The dry, windless, stable climate of the plateau has preserved the lines to this day.
In 1985, my friend and fellow National Geographic explorer, archaeologist JOHAN REINHARD published archaeological, ethnographic, and historical data demonstrating that worship of mountains and other water sources played a dominant role in Nazca religion and economy from ancient to recent times. He presented the theory that the lines and figures can be explained as part of religious practices involving the worship of deities associated with the availability of water and thus the fertility of crops. The lines were interpreted as being primarily used as sacred paths leading to places where these deities could be worshiped and the figures as symbolically representing animals and objects meant to invoke their aid. However, the precise meanings of many of the individual geoglyphs remain unsolved.
Another theory contends that the lines are the remains of "walking temples," where a large group of worshipers walked along a preset pattern dedicated to a particular holy entity, similar to the practice of labyrinth walking. Residents of the local villages say the ancient Nazca conducted rituals on these giant drawings to thank the gods and to ensure that water would continue to flow from the Andes.
Walking the beach in Paracas - which ironically translates as 'sand storm' - I visit with a couple still scooping up the remnants of what was their home. I slide my fist into cracks in the few buildings still standing. Given their experience - they ran for the hills when the earthquake-driven waves arrived - I ask if they consider moving away from the shoreline, into the mountains, for good.
"Never," she says. "Never. The sea is in my blood, I'll never leave, no matter what."
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