Nazca & The Nazca Lines

A luxurious lie-in until 7am was quickly forgotten as we were ferried to Nazca airport. Our guide, Suzy, a local from Nazca, informed us all about the small town’s rapid rise to fame & in true Hispanic style, insisted on using 10 words to describe everything, when 2 would have easily sufficed. Both GAO Adventures & Peru have taken a firm stance on sustainable tourism & insist on using local tour guides. Our guide Javier is the last non Peruvian guide to work for Gap before they are totally locally guided. All the local tour operators are bi-lingual Peruvian, so it’s made learning Spanish a little easier for me.

Once at the airport we were ushered into groups of 5 & allocated a pilot & plane. The small Cessna planes jumped quickly into the sky & followed a set route around the desert symbols as quickly as they possibly could. We were literally rolled around a Nazca lines at break neck, tourist speed “get ‘em in & get ‘em out” that left us feeling dizzy & a little sick for most of the rest of the day.

The lines were simply amazing to see from the air. Out of the wide expanse of dry, rocky desert appeared an array of symbols, shaped & lines that are literally 100’s of metres in diameter. I’d have liked to spent more time looking at them but you can’t walk in the protected desert as the lines are incredibly fragile piles of rock no higher than 6 inches high. There is a tower & hil top look out that give oblique angle views but they don’t really give you a good view from the ground, so our only option was our aerobatic barrel roll of a trip.

After everyone was down & feeling slightly less dizzy we trekked out into another part of the desert 30kms south of the town to the Cemetery of Chauchilla, to visit Pre Inca burial sites, made by the Nazca people. The morbid tourist attraction was an interesting sight made mostly but the geographically created dry area, in which hardly any – to no rain falls (ever). This has left dried corpses, clothes & hair intact with textiles & pottery lying next to them.

We returned to our farm stead located hotel to relax & unwind by the pool before eating a traditional cooked meal & hopping on a 9 hour night bus to Arequipa, Peru’s 2^nd largest city. The diner was prepared in a similar fashion to the New Zealand, Maori but burying the wrapped chicken, beef, sweat potatoes & veggies with red hot stones & cooking them for together for 3-4 hours.