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Published: November 20th 2006
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The Plane We Flew In
It only fit 3 people plus the pilot. I thought it was fun. The pilot would tip it all the way to one side so you could see the figures, and he kept turning around to talk to the people in the back! Nasca is 3 hours south of Ica, they are actually in the same region (Ica), of which there are four parts.
The statistic I heard quoted was that while Cusco is the most touristed town in Perú, Nasca is second. This is totally believable - there must have been hundreds, and I´m pretty sure we were all wearing the same outfit.
I stayed with Edgardo from Hospitality Club. He is a very sweet and thoughtful guy who also happens to give lectures on the lines and astronomy at the Maria Reiche planetarium. I had read about these lectures in my guidebook and was pretty excited about it, so it was especially fun to find myself hanging out with the person behind them. And truly behind them - he and his best friend built the planetarium (they have built four in different towns in Perú), and he wrote and designed the lecture. So my first night there, I went to hear/see it.
I had no idea how
large the lines and figures really are, or the area they cover - there are some figures which are 9 km long, and the area is hundreds of kilometers - it is basically this huge
¨The Eileen¨
This is on the side of a mountain. Does it look like an astronaut to you? (that´s what they call it). No? Would you say it looks like, oh, I don´t know, an alien? I would. flat drawing board between mountains and oases. The drawings are so large that they were actually not discovered until pilots began making comercial flights over the pampa and reported seeing strange figures. So, like 50-60 years ago. That´s all. They are still discovering new drawings, in the mountains.
The reason the drawings have not eroded (all they are are areas where the people removed the darker colored rocks to expose the lighter sand below) is that Nasca is one of the driest regions on earth. It rains something like 2 hours a year, and those are drizzles. So no rain = no erosion.
There are lines, geometric shapes, and the figure drawings. There are several competing theories as to their purpose.
Of course there´s Erich Von Danikin´s (sp?) (his first book on it was Chariots of the Gods, which is quite famous) - he thinks the lines and geometric shapes are the marks of landing sites of spaceships. The animals, presumably, were for the enjoyment of the aliens flying above.
Maria Reiche, who was a German woman who studied the lines for like 50 years, often from a stepladder, sweeping them clean with a broom when necessary (remember: kilometers long),
The Hummingbird (?)
There are over 80 bird images. This is the only good picture I got. believed that the figures were depictions of constellations and the lines pointed to places on the horizon of astronomical importance. Basically, proponents of this theory claim that the whole thing is the largest calendar ever made. The problem with this is that there are
so many lines, that it would actually be stranger if they did
not point to events of astronomical importance.
Another theory involves water rituals, claiming that many of the lines point to river beds or similar, and that they and the shapes were processed upon in order to bring rain to the mountains. This is backed up by the fact that there are apparently still rituals in the area today which require the participants to walk in exactly straight lines. However, only about 30%!o(MISSING)f the lines actually point to water sources.
And finally, my favorite: the figures are shamanic totems, set up to aid the magical flight of the shamans. I will not go into a lecture about shamanism, which of course I love, but trust me that this makes a lot of sense.
Now, the best part about all of this? The lines, shapes and figures were actually constructed over a period of about
La Pampa
See what I mean about a vast drawing board? 700 years, so any combination of these theories (or none at all!) could be true. To me this makes the most sense. The art of drawing these enormous images in the desert is passed down through generations, and each consecutive phase of the civilization uses this art for whatever is most important to it. Isn´t that what happens with art? And also, I just keep thinking that the desert makes the perfect canvas, and how could you resist drawing on it? People still do.
This concludes the lecture portion of this blog entry.
I apologize for the lack of clear pictures, but it was impossible to see anything on the screen of my camera, so I just had to point and hope. Also, the flight was over-rated. You don´t really get an idea of how large they are from the plane. The point, I think, is just to say you´ve done it.
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anonymous
non-member comment
so... are you going to write a book after this and move to nyc?