Lima and Nasca

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

We took the overnight flight from Mexico to Lima on Wednesday. It was only 6 hours but we got some sleep. We took the overpiced taxi from the airport (It´s 4 times the price of the taxis outside the airport, but at least you don´t get ripped off). We´d booked a hostel in advance and it was manky. Lovely location in Miraflores though. It´s not recommeded that you stay in Lima centre.

We snoozed until lunchtime and then went for a wander. We weren´t very adventurous in Lima, we just looked around shops, went to the cinema and ate. We went to a place called Pizza Street, which is pedestrianised and almost purely Pizza restaurants and bars, with people grabbing you and offering free Pisco Sours to eat in their restaurant. We found a nice Brazillian place with cheap Brahma and bottom wiggling dancing.

Yesterday we got a lovely coach, perhaps the nicest we´ve ever experienced, to Nasca. It only had 3 seats per row in the downstairs 1st class compartment. We felt very posh, and very comfortable. It also had films either in English, or with English subtitles which is better than the buses in Mexico with their very spanish films. We spent the whole 7 hour trip driving through barren desert.
We arrived in Nasca to a hoard of Peruvians shouting at us to come to their hotels. We walked straight past them to the hotel in our guidebook which was visible about 50m away. It´s much nicer than the place in Lima, but Nasca is hot and we don´t have air con or a fan. Apparently there´s been no significant rainfall here since the last ice age. I expect that could change now that we´re here.

Today we got up early to get on a Cessna 6 seater plane to fly over the Nasca lines. These mysterious and beautiful lines were created from about 500BC to 500AD by the ancient Nasca people (or, according to some theories, put there by aliens). The only reason they´re still there is because of the lack of rainfall and it´s forbidden for anyone to go there by land. We flew for about half an hour at between 300 and 1000 feet, and saw lots of geometric lines and pictures of a spider, a monkey, a whale, a humming bird, a condor, a parrot, a dog, an "astronaut", amongst others. The largest picture is about the size of a football pitch. We banked and turned around them in a stomach churning sort of way, before coming back for a very smooth landing.
There are various theories as to what the lines were for, including extra terrestrial landing strips, a giant calendar, and others which hopefully we´ll find out more about when we attend a lecture on the subject this evening.