Nasca (or Nazca) Lines

The drive from Cusco to Nasca took us two days.  We decided not to venture through the central highlands because the road isn't paved.  Instead the route to Nasca involved going up the mountains to 4,000m, then back down to 1,000m, back up to 4,000m again and then down to Nasca at 500m.  Needless to say, the scenery was pretty stunning, although towards the end, Paul was pretty bored of hairpin turns.

At one stage, we had to wait about 45 minutes while new Tarmac was being laid, so we pulled over and had some lunch (the beauty of having a table, fridge and running water!)

(The view out to the town of Piquio while we waited for the traffic to move again)

We got to Nasca at 7pm, just in time for the daily talk at the planetarium explaining theories behind the Nasca Lines and the life of Maria Reiche who spent her life researching them.  At the end, we got to see the hotel room where she lived for the last 25 years of her life.

It was explained to us that one of the reasons the lines have lasted since 900BC is that it rains an average of 1 hour a year in Nasca, so they don't get washed away - trust it to rain for several hours on the night Paul and I were there!

Nasca was really funny in that everything is adorned in images of the Nasca Lines, from street shelters to paving stones to restaurant table cloths (they are, after all, the only thing tourists come to see).

They are fascinating, but Paul and I weren't fascinated enough to pay $85 each for a flight to see them, especially not when there was a viewing platform along the next part of our route, that we could climb for 50p each!

From the platform we saw an upside down tree:

A 'frog':

And the van with some lines behind it:

It was good being able to see them from this height actually, cos you could see exactly how they'd been made (by moving the stones and rocks from the surface to reveal the lighter coloured earth beneath).

From Nasca, it was off to Huacachina and sandboarding!