Nazca

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Nazca is a small desert town just away from the coast in the south of Peru. The desert landscape surrounding the town features extraordinary pictures drawn into the sand by the Nazca people and stretches for about 50 miles into the desert.

There is only one real way of seeing the lines and thats by taking a small airplane up over the desert. Unfortunatley, this is also very expensive. We opted for the cheaper alternative which is a look out tower on the highway between Ica and Nazca. I was secretley very pleased about this as I hate flying and the thought of being in a small plane terrified me. My fears were not lessened any, when later back at the hostel we found out from two Argentinian guys staying, that a tourist plane taking people to see the lines had crashed two days before we arrived.

From the tower you can see three of the figures, the tree, lizard and frog, although the lizard was damaged during the construction of the highway so part of the tail is missing. Later that afternoon we went to the Nazca museum that housed a scale model of the lines as well as artifacts and information about the Nazca people. We were handed an English guidebook on entering, which translated the spanish explanation plaques on the walls, however, it didn´t explain the artifacts in the glass cabinets and were left to guess the meaning of some of the contents. The most intriguing being the cabinents of human skulls, some of which had huge holes in the head with rope tied through and others looked quite alien as thier skulls were elongated in an almost cone like shape.

We stayed in the hostel in Nazca for two nights. Our dorm was a little porta cabin place precariously on the roof of the hostel, with a thin plank between two buildings as the walkway to enter the room. Slightly scary when you need the loo in the middle of the night. The hostel had a lovely roof terrace and was the most sociable of the hostel´s we have been to so far. It was here that we met Laura from Finland who travelled with us to our next destination, Cuzco.

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