A long wait for the Nazca Lines
Trip Start
Oct 25, 2009
1
60
72
Trip End
Jun 13, 2010
Nazca, Ica, Peru
Saturday, May 1, 2010
The hostel staff came to collect us even although they were in the middle of their lunch. It was a public holiday for Labour Day so lots of the cafes had closed for the day in the small town but it was busy round the main square and as the hot sun went down people start to come out for the evening.
We’d come to see the Nazca Lines and so booked one of the short flights in a light aircraft. They came to collect us at 9am the next morning & we followed the accepted advice not to take breakfast, as the flights can be bumpy. We were dropped at the Aeroparacus offices and watched a DVD all about the history and theories of how & why the lines & shapes were created. Basically, they’re very old dating from around 900BC – AD600, probably created by ancient Paracus & Nazca cultures. There’s about 800 lines, 300 figures & some 70 animal or plant drawings. The figures have been given names like “condor”, “spider” etc. and the plane flies a flight path that takes you over some of the most well known ones. Theywere ‘drawn’ by moving the red brown stones at the surface of the desert to expose the white sand underneath, the amazing thing is that the scale of the images is so big that they can’t be seen from the ground, only really from the air.
While we waited for the 30 minute flight for one hour, then two, we got chatting with Pia and Rick, a nice Portuguese couple and were joined by a pair of Austrian girls, eventually after 3 hours wait we were taken to the airport & checked in for our flight. By this time we were a little narkey, mainly because we hadn’t had any breakfast and started to complain to the airline who gave us a bottle of water ……… and a further wait of 2 hours!! Crazy system, other bigger groups on day trips from Lima taking preference over our cheaper tickets.
Anyway the flight finally came – a wee 8-seater Cessna, the pilot, a guide and 6 passengers; it was baking hot in the plane, it had been running all day in the desert sun and we were now in the mid-afternoon heat & all we’d had since getting up was a couple of drinks of water.
But it’s not a flight in a straight line, oh no … we took off and shortly the pilot or guide shouts “whale to the right” and the plane banks tight to the right, he circles and banks to the left shouting “whale to the left – under the wing tip, under the wing tip!” and the plane continues to thread an aerobatics display course to view the major figures in the short flight time. This was amazing and would have been a fantastic experience but after the third figure and “spider to the left, spider to the left” this wild ride on low blood sugar in a jolting sauna was starting to make us all feel a bit sick & dizzy. Somehow Martyn managed to take some pictures and we all held onto the little contents of our stomachs!
At the end of an amazing and tortuous 30 minutes roller coaster ride we staggered out of the plane & back into the terminal to be told we could have a free lunch as compensation for the huge delay. Lunch was about the last thing on my mind right then so we went back to the hostel had a lie down & after about half an hour felt OK to go & eat. We were treated to anything we wanted from the menu (as long as it was chicken, due to the holiday they had nothing else!) at the pretty roof top restaurant next door & enjoyed it with our new Portuguese friends. What an experience!! And one that would have been far better if the flights company had picked us up later or taken us back to our hostel to wait …. but this IS south America of course.
Our last day went much more smoothly, we took a trip to see some ancient mummified remains in a desert cemetery – a cheery thing to do! In fact our guide was really good & gave us his explanation that the Nazca lines are all to do with trying to get the gods to send more water to parch the desert lands; it only rains about 5mm/year and they rely on underground irrigation systems to bring water from the Andes. Because it’s so dry they could wrap up the remains of important people, shamen & sometimes even children & a (pet?) bird! They put some herbal leaves in cloth layer around the bodies and this acted as a preservative. The cemetery had been ransacked by looters looking for gold, so there were fragment of bone & skulls all over the place just lying in the dust. The tombs were excavated only 40 years ago & even then it wasn’t extensive so there’s probably more to learn about these remains. What we could see was the open tombs and some of the intact remains that are still left there, amazing to see the shamans with their dreadlocks that were 2 meters long, draped around the wrapped remains with the skull on top – weird!
Even considering the delay in our flight we'd quite enjoyed our couple of days in Nazca with the friendly Walk On Inn hostel staff and Pia and Rick. For tourists it's a bit of a two street desert town with several restaurants (we liked the Hotel Los Angeles), lots of folks promenading in the evening and of course the unforgettable(!) lines.
