Nazca

We arrived in Nazca to what appeared to be a very sandy town (well, this is a desert after all) and proceeded to our hotel via taxi. We'd found a gem of a place to stay it turned out which was- as it marketed itself- an oasis in the desert. We pretty much flopped and enjoyed the surroundings of the hotel for the rest of the day and the next which was some hardship as I'm sure you can imagine! The hotel itself had a little planetarium in its grounds that they opened for a nightly show where they got a huge telescope out so you could view the stars. Since we were in the middle of nowhere the view was AMAZING and as for the moon, you could see craters and all sorts. No sign of the man in the moon unfortunately. The main event was the show within the planetarium, in which we learned all about the mystical Nazca lines that are to be found in the desert plains nearby. Apologies to those who have visited these already (Hannah) but as a short summary some mysterious lines and outlines of animals etched into the sand were discovered by some dude flying overhead in his plane in 1930-something. Previous to this they were not known about by the local population as their location was remote and, due to their sheer scale, impossible to see from the ground. Clever people who are able to date these things discovered they were made by the Nazca civilisation (200BC to 700 AD). No-one really knows why they were made but there are several theories including religious worship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasca_lines. Anyway interesting stuff that we were going to explore first hand over the next few days. On the way back to our room I had a terrifying encounter with a strange creature that was loose in the gardens, and as it approached us I had to make a dash for it back to the relative safely of our room to protect myself and my baby boy. (Ari didn't seem to mind the threat of impending doom as much).

In the cool light of day this mysterious creature turned out to be non other than the hotel's 'pet' llama named Dina (by some coincidence also the name of my mother in law) who was ridiculously curious in the goings on of the guests. Not very au fait with such creatures I decided to be a little cautious in approaching her but eventually gave in to her charms. Also roaming the ground were peacocks and horses, a true menagerie!



Enough of this incidental stuff, I shall move on to the purpose of our visit, the trip to see the lines. This obviously has to be undertaken by air, and so we popped to the local airport to board the tiny aircraft that was to take us for our half hour viewing. The lines and pictorials were shown to us by the expert pilot by aligning and dipping his wing to point it out. Vomit inducing stuff. But a truly amazing experience. What is amazing is a) how the Nazca people managed to create these artistic images without seeing them from above b) how they still exist, they are simply etched into the ground, a few inches deep. It is because of the climate of the area, it is so dry and the air so still that they simply have been preserved as they are. Incredible that they haven't blown away. And they really are in the middle of nowhere, these people would have had to endure great physical torture creating these images and geometric shapes in the middle of the desert.


After this morning excursion and punctuated by a shopping experience in the little town of Nazca and a trying time looking for cotton wool (for Leo's bum-oops sorry little one) we had a second trip to visit an aqueduct and the lines from the ground. Being a town in the desert obviously water is a problem, the locals in the town have water only 3 hours every day. The little they obtain is from underground channels running down from the mountains, channeled by underground aqueducts originally constructed in ancient times. Ingenious. The stop by the lines was merely to get an idea of how large they appear from the ground, and how shallowly constructed they really are. Oh and while we were there we saw a great sunset before returning back to our hotel to rest our heads before another long bus journey, this time to the city of Arequipa.