Nazca
A night bus from Cusco to Nazca, not the best nights sleep either of us have had, saw us pull into Nazca at around 7am. Before we knew it we were in a taxi to the airport to get a 8.30am flight over the famous Nazca lines.
The lines are a series of geoglyphs in the desert created between 200BC and 700AD – noone really knows why – but there are a lot of theories about.
We got in our 6-seater cesna, without having breakfast, as recommended by all guidebooks and the flight operators themselves. A good thing too, as the flight was fairly acrobatic, with sharp twists and turns enabling us all to see the lines – it took us a while back on terra firma to regain our stomachs!
It also took a while to get your eye in, the lines didn’t stand out as much as I expected, but once you did you started seeing all sorts of things, some of which weren’t probably there at all. We definately saw a whale, astronat, monkey, hands, condor and some geometric shapes.
They we impressive, but you get no sense of how big they are from the air.
After the flight we had about 12 hours to fill before our next night bus to Arequipa. We were stopped by a trainee tourist guide in the street whilst looking for some breakfast who offered to take us to the paradones and aqueducts (Cantayoc) for free, as she was training, all she wanted was a tip at the end. We agreed, and a day after promising ourselves we wouldn´t be visiting any ruins for a while, we were back at some!
The paradones aren’t in great condition, but the aqueducts were impressive, consisting of a series of undergroud aqueducts and reservoirs with sprial access pathways built between 300 and 600AD. It was the sprials that we were taken to see – I think there are about 50 of them in total – an impressive sight, although we did wonder why they went to such effort when a ladder would have surficed!
Tags: Nazca, Peru, Travel
Jenni
Leave a Reply