Food | Ocucaje

Only then does Roberto pull out a map and an album. "Gail, what you're about to see will shock you. If I showed these photos to everyone in Huacachina, there'd be a line of people fighting to go with me." I am mesmerized. We're talking fossilized whale skeletons, giant shark teeth larger than a man's hand, pre-Hispanic pottery partially­ exposed in the sand, and human bones and skulls exposed by grave robbers, or huaqueros, who plundered the 3,000-year-old tombs of the Paracas people.

Clad in hiking boots, a khaki shirt, an Australian oilskin hat, lightweight pants with zip-off legs, and with a 10-inch knife hanging from his belt, Roberto arrives the next morning driving the heavily­ modified 1981 Datsun truck he fondly calls Hermelinda. Provisioned with food and bottled water, camping gear, firewood, three spare tires, and a makeshift shower with a 27-gallon tank, we are good to go. We take off, first through the little town of Ocucaje, where locals we pass acknowledge Roberto's desert foray with a salute. We won't see another human being for two days.

Within an hour, we're off-roading in a landscape formed over millions of years by colliding tectonic plates. Our first stop: a large fossilized whale skeleton that includes eye sockets, a skull, and a partial spine and vertebrae. So what happened to the rest? "Erosion wouldn't destroy half a whale," Roberto says. "No, the lower part had to be taken by something strong, and that's the megalodon. See the sharp break in the spine? Sometimes you'll even find teeth marks on the bones." All around us are earthy-looking heaps, more fossilized skeletons, but Roberto is barely interested in the whales - all he can think about are megalodons.