Our tour company arranged for all transport for us (which was VERY nice), so someone picked us up at 6am from our apartment. From there we went to the bus station and boarded the bus, then left Lima at 7:00am. We stopped in Paracas around 10:30am to drop off some people, then went to Ica (which was 2 hours away). We really had some confusion during the trip because our tour company assured us people would be "picking us up" from each location, but when there are multiple stops, it can get kind of nerve-wracking. So, we randomly stopped at a hotel called Las Dunas in Ica, and someone was standing there with a sign that said "Jason Burnham x 2." We got off, then got in a private car with our tour guide and a driver. We then drove to Nasca (another 2 hours away).
On the bus at 7am.
Buen viaje! Peruvian tollbooth
A very scary tunnel on the Pan-American highway.
We stopped a few times during our drive- we got to learn some really neat things about different provinces in the area and the surrounding environments. One of the best views was of the Rio Grande Valley. This then changed to the desert where the lines are found, which is part of the Atacama Desert (the 2nd driest in the world). They get like 2-6cm of rain during the entire year, which is why the lines have been preserved for so long.
Standing in front of the [Peruvian] Rio Grande Valley
The valley
Some houses
Cathedral in Palpa, Peru. The main income of these parts of Peru is agriculture; they are the 2nd leading producer of asparagus, and they also grow oranges, artichokes, and a ton of other products that are shipped all over the world. We learned that for this reason, Peru isn't as affected by the economic crisis as other countries, because everybody loves them some asparagus no matter how bad it gets.
There are some rock drawings on that hill from the Paracas Indians, who lived before the Nasca Indians... so a long freakin time ago (before 500-200 BCE). If you can tell, there is a little man on one of the slopes, then a family of people near the far left slope. All the tops of the rocks are black because they are full of iron-oxide. The desert is red/black depending on the rocks' exposure to the sun. The rocks absorb the heat all day, and so even when there are wind currents, the layer of heat being released from the rocks protects them from being disturbed by the wind.
For those that don't know much about the Nazca Lines (or Lineas de Nasca), they are a bunch of figures and geometric shapes in the desert that have existed for over 2000 years. No one really understand their purpose; there are figures of animals, as well as many, MANY lines in all kinds of directions. I think the most rational explanation is that they were used for rituals, and also sites for collecting water (with ceramics such as those below) during the 4 hours of rain each year. The Nasca Indians also collected trophy heads, so perhaps they were sites of sacrifice. They are thought to be a calendar, as some of the lines line up directly with the setting of the sun during the Winter Equinox, but only 25% of the figures line up with the stars, so there is something else going on that no one understands. Of course, there is always the theory that they are alien runways (which a fair amount of people believe in).
The lines were made my scraping away the red pebbles of the desert and exposing the white clay that lies beneath. Because of the climate of the area, they have been preserved all this time. What is truly amazing is that the desert is flat, and there is no known way the Nasca Indians could have seen what the lines looked like from a higher location. It is possible they constructed hot air balloons to observe them, but to build them it would've been far too windy to stay in one position to make the designs as accurate as they are. There were wooden stakes found in some of the lines, so they possibly designed the figures ahead of time and then just scraped away the rocks- but regardless, it is extremely impressive they were able to construct these figures (that are up to 200m large). No one really knew they existed until the last century, and they probably wouldn't even be cared about if not for Maria Reiche. Here are some pictures from her museum.
Maria Reiche was a German woman who dedicated her life to understanding the Nasca Lines. She walked along the lines almost every day for 50 years to try to understand their meaning. This little museum was also where she lived (she died in 1998)- and this is her actual drawing of the lines (under a piece of glass on the wall, in an open-air museum). My guess is this will be in a fancy air-conditioned museum one day, but for now no one cares enough about the lines to do anything.
These are the actual tape-measurers she used to scale the lines... also just sitting in this little museum.
These pots are over 2000 years old. We probably could've taken one if we wanted and no one would notice. The Nascas polished their ceramics by using the oil from their faces... all these were found along the lines.
Look-out tower to see the "hands" and a "tree." This is right off the Pan-American highway... the highway destroyed one of the drawings, because no one even really cared about them till a few decades ago. There are tire marks over many of them, which is absurd considering they are around 2000 years old and cars in the last few years are their biggest threat.
The Tree from the look-out. It's upside down here.
Walking down the tower, and quite thankful (those stairs were steep).
This is at the Nasca airport. It only serves tourists over the lines.
Very nervous about riding in the plane that was smaller than my car, plus wings. I don't care if my dad and his parents were all pilots... I'm not yet convinced being more than a few feet off the ground is natural.
Our awesome pilot on the left and another Dutch tourist on the right.
Here's a look at the lines: this is the Monkey (you can see his tail that is a huge spiral, and his head is towards the right bottom).
The "Astronaut" - this is why people believe aliens drew these lines. I think it's a person that is just fat, or maybe the Michelin Man... but it is still pretty impressive.
This is the "Condor"... one of my favorites. His beak is pointing towards the bottom and his wings are pretty centered, towards the bottom.
There is the wing. Pointing directly at the ground. I'm pretty sure there is a whale in this picture being cut in half by the line going down towards the bottom left. I'm not sure, but at least you can get a feeling of our "view" the whole time (by the way, airplanes should not be allowed to fly at such angles).
Wing again, that big wide strip is one of the geometric shapes. All those other straight lines are theirs, too.
The Spider
So happy to be on sweet, sweet ground.
I have a lot more pictures if anyone wants them. The flight was quite interesting, at first I was nervous because I'd never been in a cessna. Then I was nervous because the pilot kept turning all the way around to talk to us about the lines. Once I convinced myself he wasn't going to run into anything in the sky, I calmed down... and then motion sickness set in. You see, to show us the lines, he turned the plane completely sideways, then would turn very quickly and do the same for the other side of the plane. We saw 12 figures in 35 min- so this got old, very fast. I'm not abnormally susceptible to motion sickness, but I do get it- especially when trying to focus on a camera while the world is going by me very fast below. So, after the "astronaut pic"- I didn't even look with the camera. I just took a ton of pictures hoping that the figures would get in one of them. The pilot kept turning around to ask "is everything okay" - and other than me being green and holding vomit in my mouth, I was. I mean, my headache went away about 3 hours later (then came back a few hours after that). Oh well- I'm so glad we did it, and now I won't have to ever again :)
We got lunch in Nasca after the flight (at um... 4:30pm), then took the 2 hour drive back to Ica, then 50 min to Paracas. Our hotel was really nice (not like a Hilton), but your average 3 star Latin American shack-up. We were about 100m from the ocean, so that was cool, too. It was about 9pm when we got to Paracas, so we snacked on PB&Js and went to bed to get up early on Sunday.
My computer is about to die (something about using it while charging is impossible with the power converter...) so I'm going to let it charge and will talk about Sunday fun later on.
So which is the driest desert in the world? I've been told by everyone (which includes the whole world) that the Atacama is number 1 in the category of dryness.
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