The time finally came when I could put it off no longer – I was starting to look like many of the travelers we saw about the place. You know the type: the guys where you can carbon date how long they have been travelling by the length of their scraggy hair and stupid unkempt beards. Despite a few rash boasts and not a little encouragement I have yet to either dye my hair blue, or to shave it all off (thanks AS). Instead, I decided that the little Peruvian town of Nazca would be where I broke my expensive habit of Keiko at John Allan’s in midtown and had a truly cheap haircut. Like, a really cheap haircut. Like, a ten Peruvian soles haircut.

I was surprisingly nervous. Lucy and I scoped out the various “pulquerias” and eventually settled on two, one of which we then eliminated because one of the salon chairs had been replaced by a ride-on toy racing car for kiddie haircuts. And I would have wanted to ride on it, and that wouldn’t have been cool. I negotiated with the lady in charge, who naturally spoke no English and seemingly didn’t understand my extremely descriptive international haircut semaphore. Eventually, the instruction (in Spanish) “like Ricky Martin, but straight” got her started. Lucy mercifully waited until later to inform me that I had actually asked for a haircut “like Ricky Martin, but a woman”.

Anyway, twenty sweaty minutes later I came out looking … well, you’ll have to wait and see.

Oh, we also took the opportunity to hire a light aircraft to fly at low level over the Nazca lines. Mysterious ancient civilization; huge prehistoric markings in the desert; unknown purpose; kilometer long geometric figures; massive glyphs of animals, birds, insects (and allegedly spacemen); discovered by accident earlier this century yadda yadda yadda.