Nazca Lines - Peru
• 6 min read
Last updated
Just a single day ride away from Lima is the infamous Nazca.
I mean the city itself is nothing to write home about, so I won’t.
We are here only for the Nazca lines!
That’s not a photo of the lines…it’s us. I wanted to include it, just in case you forgot what we look like.
Anyway, we decided to not go through a tour agency and just drove to the airport.
A tiny little place, with a few counter. You go up to the counter, pay $70 per person and you get a stamp in your passport!
No..no…I kid the stamp is free, the $70 is for the 40 minute flight to take a look at the Nazca lines.
After you pay, you wait around, staring at the latest dramatization of construction of the lines on TV. Once you get enough people, at least 4, you are ready.
Our rag tag crew consisted of Hyein and I, a brit and a korean.
A total of 6 people, 2 crew and 4 passengers.
Take off was nice an gentle, but we didn’t climb very high. All the following photos are taken from 250-300 m high.
These are our photos…this is what the lines actually look like…not what you find on the tour brochures.
The whale.
Another view of the whale.
View of the dessert on which the lines are located with some farms in the background.
For some reason these hills came out in a negative color, I’m pretty sure they didn’t look exactly like this. Something to do with exposure and contrast?
Successive views of the “astronaut”. There is a theory that the Nazca lines were created by aliens, because apparently people did not posses the necessary technology to do so.
Really? NO…REALLY? It’s a bunch of lines in dirt…it’s not the international space station. Hyein and I could do this, given enough time.
And I guess mystery sells tickets, so the whole alien theory is further perpetuated. And conveniently, this little guy looks like a person in a space suit.
Anyway…moving on…
Oh hey, it’s me…trying to hold in my vomit.
I didn’t tell you yet?
The pilot leans the plane so that you get a really good view at the ground, making the wings almost vertical.
This means that people who are not used to this, basically all the tourists, get really, really, really nauseous.
Hyein, being the smart one in our relationship, took a dramamine. And I decided to man it out.
This is what a horizontal position of the plane looks like… so all the photos of the ground are taken when your stomach is about to empty itself.
Monkey. ooooh…I’m getting nauseous just looking at this photos…my body has a conditional memory.
Dog…Dog? why does it have two tails?
Humming bird.
Condor.
Spider.
Just hills.
This is apparently a parrot.
Lines…too lazy to scroll up and look up the names.
Okay here is the cool part.
When driving to Nazca, you can stop by the side of the road. Climb up a watch tower and look at a few drawings.
This is what we saw from the tower.
Any guesses to what these are?
How about an aerial view?
Can you see it now? Well, it’s obviously a “tree” on the left and “hands” on the right. Who knew?
And that’s the road and the tower from which we took the photos.
Spiral.
Heading back to the airport.
I looks happy because I managed to keep from sharing the contents of my stomach with the rest of the crew.
But the guy next to me…he had the plastic bag out the whole time. I swear if he would have started…I don’t know if I would have been able to control myself.
Overall, I’m ambivalent about this experience.
- $70 is a lot of money in this part of the world
- It is a vomit inducing flight (I've never been car or sea sick before)
- Lines are hard to see