DAY 64: I was lying in bed in the darkness of my room with no windows when there was a knock on the door. It was my driver for my transport to the airport -- an hour and a half early. Lizet, the girl I booked the Nazca lines air tour with the day before, must have mixed something up, because I was suddenly on an 8 a.m. flight instead of a 9. Groggily, I put on my clothes and hopped in the car. It was the first time things in Peru actually ran ahead of schedule.

My driver Ernesto -- who surprisingly spoke very good English -- proved once again how small the world is when he told me he had lived and worked in Union City, NJ (across the Hudson River from New York City) for twenty years before retiring back in Peru. With our metro New York City connection, he suggested that if I was going to leave Nazca that night, I should get a bus ticket early, so we went to the CIVA office and snagged one of the few remaining seats.

By 8 a.m. I was already in the co-pilot seat of a prop plane, taking off high above the desert mountains. The pilot let go of the controls every so often to point out the different pictographs that had been drawn in the earth. The Nazca civilization drew many lines and pictures in the desert, including a whale (picture above), a spider, a hummingbird and a guy that looks like an astronaut.

Since the Nazcas predated the Incas and left no written records of why the lines and pictures were drawn, they remain a mystery to this day. Several theories exist, including that of UFO contact, but many believe that they were drawn as a sort of astronomical calendar -- each picture represents a zodiac sign. Famed German scientist Maria Reiche believed they had agricultural purposes.

If you ask me, I think that perhaps they were just drawn for art's sake, or perhaps some sort of commercial purpose. Comedian Robin Williams once pointed out a Disney office building with statues of the seven dwarfs and said that in thousands of years, people will probably think the Floridian civilization worshipped guys like Dopey.

Although the prop plane flight was very smooth, the lack of equilibrium got me a little motion sick, so it was good it only lasted about 40 minutes. Having airsickness is similar to being hungover, so I had one of those Hangover Helper pork-filled breakfast tamales again.

"ERIK," A VOICE CALLED from across the street as I finished my meal. It was my new guide who was looking for me for my land tour. His name was Jesus, a kind man who always addressed me by my first name everytime he started a new sentence. I hopped in his car and he drove me to the archaelogical sites around town. Passed cotton fields, we saw the ancient underground Nazca aqueducts with their air vents to keep the flow of water going from the mountains to the dry desert. A mathematical marvel, the aqueducts have withstood the many earthquakes in the region's history.

Jesus took me to the"Needles", a nearby Nazca line site theorized to be used for irrigation, followed by the ancient Incan ruins of Parecones, a trading center between the Nazca region and the Incan capital Cuzco.

AFTER A MIDDAY SIESTA, I circumvented possible mix-ups of Lizet the tour operator and hired Jesus directly for a tour of the ancient cemetary, 30 minutes south of town in the middle of the vast desert. On the drive down, Jesus told me about his philosophies on life and his sons, how he believed electrical jobs were the future, and that he wishes he could turn the clock back twenty years to start a water plant.

"Erik, [I tell my son who is finishing university, leave Peru and get a good job in electrical fields. Work for fifteen years and come back and make a plant here. Marry a woman, as long as she is not Peruvian. The problem with Peruvian women is that they think with their heart, not their head,]" he told me, all fatherly like. Perhaps it was in observation of his daughters that gave up their prosperous careers to just be housewives.

DESERT WINDS BLEW SAND into my hair as Jesus pointed out the different tombs of the cemetary. In fact, the entire region was one big cemetary -- there were human bone remains and scraps of clothing scattered all over -- and it is common for gravediggers to come out and try and dig for hidden gold buried with the dead. The mummies were all in fetal positions -- a position to be reborn in the afterlife -- some still with their hair intact. It looked like something out of a Grateful Dead festival.

After the mummies, Jesus took me to a handmade ceramics factory and to a local former miner's house who sang me a gold extraction demonstration. I killed time until my 9 p.m. bus by walking around town afterwards, when I ran into Lizet who wanted me to go to some party. Heeding the advice of Jesus and knowing how she mixed things up before, I just told her that I was leaving for Cuzco, which was the truth anyway.

At the bus station, the bus came 90 minutes late, but I managed to get on. Even with a reservation, it's hard to get a seat because the buses stop in towns and pick up random people anyway. Two American guys luckily got on the bus as well, and we rode through the darkness into the Andes. A Steven Segal movie put me to sleep.