Marveling the Nazca Lines

Last stop on our Peruvian excursion was to make a brief 2-day visit to Nazca, home to the mysterious kilometers long straight lines and the giant animal figures worked on some 500 sq. km of the desert for an unknown reason ages ago. This included a 10 hour overnight bus ride from Arequipa, one overnight stay and the back on the bus for another 12-13 hours to reach the Chilean border down south. While Nazca is not just about the lines - they boast the world's largest sand dune at over 2km tall to be conquered with a sandboard, for example - we couldn't squeeze other activities in our rather short stay. We only have 4 days till our flight out of Santiago, and the distance to cover on the bus is quite big.

The only proper way to view the lines is to hop on a small Cessna and take a flight over the plateau. These flights used to be dirt cheap only a few years ago, but after some fatal incidents in 2010, the flight safety has been upped greatly and naturally the costs have followed. The going price for a same-day reservation seemed to be 90-100$, though you might be able to shave some off with an advance booking. We went straight to the airport to shop around, but every company said they were full, but an agency back in the town managed to get us on a plane for the next morning, with a slightly better deal too.

What they do with the Cessna is they fly you over some 13 of the figures, banking the plane left and right so everyone gets a nice view. The first two turns were gut-turning, I'm assuming the captain did that on purpose :P After those, the ride was very pleasant and thanks to the near-perfect weather, we had a blast wondering about those strange markings below. Wonder what the people who made them had been thinking? 'Lets spend a few decades building something for the guys hundreds of years from now to scratch their heads over'?

After the flight we had the whole afternoon to kill so we paid a big hotel to let us use their pool / bar and lazed in the sun reading books. With Nazca done, this concludes our Peruvian segment of the trip; what's left of the South American leg is the seemingly endlessly long busride down south to Santiago!





See all the pictures from Peru here!