A fleeting visit to Lima and Nasca

We are going to keep this fairly short since our experiences of Lima and Nasca were brief and in the main, rather uneventful.

Lima
Peru’s capital is huge - some 11 million or so people living here. Most of those people reside in fairly basic abodes and live a hand to mouth existence. Even within the more affluent areas some of the houses looked incomplete and the streets are not entirely welcoming. That said, it always feels a bit like that when you first get to a big city you don't know and we didn't have time to get past that in our 2 day fleeting visit. We did manage to find a few hidden treasures though in this vast place:

• An active archeological site called "Huaca Pucllana"; a huge pyramid right in the centre of town, built in the pre-Inca period. We could see (and stand on) 7 layers of the pyramid but it is expected that there are many, many more layers below ground. Work is on-going and it was strange to see bones and ceramics being literally excavated in front of us.
  
  
• The Plaza de Armas had some very impressive churches and the presidential palace.
  
  Map of the lines
  
  We timed it with the changing of the guard which was interesting to see but paled in comparison with that of Buckingham Palace.
  
  
• The Monasterio de San Francisco which had 70,000 people buried beneath it in its huge crypt. People were buried here over a period of 300 years up until the 1700's, they believed that it brought them closer to god. It was a very interesting place and very eerie with all the bones laid out in piles. The most impressive / grim sight, depending on your point of view, was a well filled with skulls. It was 7 metres deep but only looked about 1 metre to us as it was full of skulls.
  

Otherwise we spent our time in and around Miraflores - the most upmarket district of Lima. Here we bought some pants (as ours keep disappearing in the wash!) and ate good food with the locals.

Nasca
We spent some time discussing what the blog title would have been had this place warranted a blog entry of its own. Based on the fact that this place has nothing to recommend it except for the Nasca lines, we came up with following potential blog headers....."Nasca Nasties", "Magic lines in missable surroundings" and our favourite..... "Do your lines then go home!".

The restaurants made for some amusement value. Chloe got a microwaved pizza and the tomato soup I ordered (playing it safe) was inedible at best. And this was us searching out and choosing the nicest places in town. Anyone thinking of heading to Nasca - bring a packed lunch!

The lines themselves, though, were definitely worth stopping for. To get the best view of them you need to take a half hour flight in a tiny plane of 4 people. It was incredible to see the shapes of various animals in the sand along with innumerable, interconnecting lines especially as nobody knows where the lines came from exactly or what purpose they had - though, of course, theories abound. The flight was quite an experience as well with the plane turning to a 45+ degree angle first on one side then the other to allow us to all get a good view of each of the 12 animals. The most amusing part was at the end when the pilot asked if we wanted to do the 'up and down' in the plane, this was met by a resounding 'NO' from an already rather green Phil. We made it back though without seeing breakfast again and despite what we've said about Nasca above would definitely recommend anyone to go here to see the lines as they were cool.

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