Drawing the lines

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Our research had indicated that Nazca bus station was usually a blackspot for hotel touts, but when we pulled in at 6AM they were clearly still all in bed, and we were able to plod to our hotel of choice unmolested. I caught up on a couple of hours of banzai-free sleep then went in search of what I'd come here for - a flight over the Nazca lines. I was expecting to pay somewhere in the region of $50 for a 30 minute flight, but all the quotes I received were $70 or more. Falling prey to the mindset of "I didn't come all this way not to see anything", I resignedly handed over the cash and waited for my time slot to come round.

The Nazca lines are a series of large-scale drawings created (from 400BC for the next millenium) by clearing away the crust of the Pampa (i.e. the desert plain near Nazca) to reveal the lighter surface beneath. They first became known to the wider world in the 1920s, when pilots in the burgeoning airline industry reported seeing strange things in the desert. Though the drawings of animals are the most tourist-friendly, they're hardly unique as such drawings exist all over the Americas - the uniqueness lies in the profusion of straight lines and trapezoids. It's interesting that, throughout Peru, there's a propensity even nowadays for writing on hillsides that I've seen nowhere else.

There are various theories about the purpose of the lines, starting at them being alien landing strips and getting steadily less ludicrous. The most likely theory centres on the Nazca culture's dependence on water. The Pampa has not had any significant rainfall since the last Ice Age, and the main source of water for the desert plain is run-off from the Andes, which the Nazca people channelled to their fields via a complex irrigation system still in use today. The dryness of the region is evident in the excellent state of preservation of mummies from 1,500 years ago.

This theory maintains that the Pampa was a representation of the Nazca world, with hills and mounds on the plain standing in for the Andes from which the Nazca people knew their life-giving water came. Evidence for this comes from the facts that the majority of the geoglyphs point to water sources, and most of the rest point to representations of mountains. It's known that processing along the geoglyphs has been a custom for generations, with the suggestion being that such processions were to "encourage" water to flow between the representative points, and hence for the same to occur in real life. This has parallels with the use of buildings laid out in a mandala in Hinduism and Buddhism - the procession of pilgrims through the building activates the properties of the mandala. There was a large increase in the production of drawings in the 6th century AD, which was coincidentally the period of a great drought.

This theory could also explain the animal drawings on the Pampa - they are all drawn in one continuous line (i.e. perfect for processing around), and processing around them might have been thought to confer the particular properties of the animal on the processor(s).

As for why the Nazca lines can only be seen clearly when viewed from above, it's perhaps because they were intended to be seen by shamans in their trance-induced "flights". All the sites of large-scale drawings throughout the Americas are in areas with a known shamanic culture. There may be parallels with, say, Christianity, where many churches are constructed in a cruciform shape most obvious when viewed from above.

I found the history of the lines fascinating, with most of the interesting stuff from a BBC video that I had to insist on being shown after the flight (it was part of the package but the tour company had decided not to show it - I'm sure this was in no way related to them being late for their flight slot), but the overflight was a disappointment. The pilot, 4 other tourists, and myself boarded the 6-seat Cessna and within minutes were airborne, the formalities of take-off massively abridged from those of, say, a 300-seater Airbus A340. In such a small plane, the buffeting of every gust of wind could be felt, and I had one hand moulded to the seat in front, keeping the aircraft aloft by magical thinking. The flight took in all the main drawings with the pilot making two passes of each, so that everyone on both sides of the plane had a good look. It was surprisingly difficult to make out some of the figures, their smallness within the vastness of the desert, and the confusing criss-crossing of other lines and paths, rendering them elusive. I proved totally inept as an aerial photographer, as can be seen from the paucity of photos. For a few seconds of the flight, we were joined by a condor conducting its own tour.

I'm hoping to find out some more about shamanic cultures later in the trip, with a latent interest piqued further by a clip in the BBC video showing a shaman stroking a woman's head with a guinea pig, its squeals supposedly telling him which parts of the woman's head had problems.

The next morning, we were on a bus north to Lima.

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Photos

Kidney-shaped pool
Hotel Alegria

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[BALIBUDDY]

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