Nasca lines

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After riding on a bus about 3 hours we arrived in the afternoon in the small town of Nasca/Nazca. We got off the bus and found a cab to take us to the airport. We had already bought our tickets to fly over the Nasca lines so after waiting for about 2 hours and finding that we were the last people in the airport and the sun was about to set, we started pressuring the tour company and finally they called us out to the tarmac to board our tiny, four person plane. We met our captain who I got to sit in the front with and off into the air we went. After about 5 minutes in the plane, there was a terrible and deafening scratchy noise that came through our earphones. It kept going on and off with an intermittent person talking. From the small amount of Spanish I could pick up it sounded and looked like there was a sand storm coming, but our plane kept its course. After about 10 minutes we had reached our first Nasca line, the astronaut. It was interesting to see because it was this huge, perfectly straight and symmetric drawing, carved into the side of the mountain and there is no explanation yet as to the origins of the drawings. However, I started feeling nauseous when the pilot started dipping each wing down so that each side of the plane could get a clear view of the lines. The sickness persisted the rest of the 30 minute flight and instead of enjoying the mysterious drawings all I could think about was wanting to get out of the plane. Finally, we returned to the airport (which was very basic, two runways, a small control tower and a couple people holding orange flags). We were just about to land when our pilot pulled the throttle back and we swooped straight back into the sky. It is hard to explain the situation, but I pretty much thought we had just escaped death because our pilot said there was another plane right in the middle of the run way that we would have hit. We reattempted the landing and thankfully we were successful. We took a taxi back to town and hung out on the couches of a fancy hotel while we waited for the night bus that would take us to Arequipa.

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