30th june
Life seems to be half-lived aboard buses! saving money and saving time by taking overnight buses results in sleep deprivation and memories of those strange creatures of the night! boarding another bus heading to Nazca for the day, i get placed next to a man that begins snoring before even getting to sleep. sitting up in a chair that reclins only so far, and having your legs choked by the seat in front of you so that the need to go to the bathroom is left till the last possible moment as you fear further damage by attempting to escape...and this was on their premier service- Cruz Del Sur!
Their saving grace was their attempt at entertainment- so came the imaginative rise of bus bingo! a guy finally calls out ¨BINGO¨when i still had only one more to cross out. I ask the guy next to me in spanish ¨did she call out the no 8¨- my remaining number...turns out that she had, meaning i could have won! make my claim and end up in a draw with the guy, whose name gets pulled out of a hat instead of mine! bollocks!
another strange fact... if there
is money to be made out of suckers, A peruvian will not sleep! arriving at 5:30 , we already get hounded by numerous touts trying to get our business!
get taken to a random hostel, lured by our favourite morning addiction- coffee...
take, take, take...Everything in Peru, i´m learning, just costs a shitload of money. Toured the nearby Inca gravesite- quite intriguiging actually. a desert away from the town, filled with old bones scattered over the grounds. graves uncovered, exhibit their deceased inhabitants in open air with wall-free rooms as their only protection from the weather. Inside the graves, the dead speak out about their traditions, their class systems and their personal beliefs...its a shame that tomb robbers had previously denied us from fully appreciating the wealth and burial customs of this intriguing culture.
Then the highlight....the infamous and puzzling NAZCA lines. thousands of lines and figures engraved upon the sandy landscape, intact for over 1000 years and eluding to things unexplained, but yet enabling one to ponder on the possibilities. Figures of monkeys, hummingbirds, spiders, dolphins set among hundreds of straight lines spanning kilometres. could they have been built by The Nazca people as a means
Nazca linescan u see the image of the whale?? its upside down!
of evaluating the sun´s course or could they be indeed a means of communication by life outside of our own galaxy, sent over 1000 years old! We boarded a small plane, carrying 6 people, and flew high above the lines. you get a full appreciation of the figures sprayed over the landscape, at the same time ponder about the ingenuity of creating these figures with such clarity and proportion at a time when flight was not possible!
This was also a sad day as Argentina gets eliminated from the World cup...it definitely was not a fair match! Italians have clearly been to acting classes (sorry Antonio- you know its true!!)
humming-birdthis is meant to be the ancient astrological representation of sagitarius...my star sign
our mini planewe all felt sick afterwards. Claudio was dry wretching. And Lacy was close behind.