Nazca, Peru

Jan 2001

Jeremy and I arrived into Nazca on a very early morning bus, checked out the lines, cemetery and a few other things before high tailing it for Nazca. 

Nazca Lines

There's only one real reason to come to Nazca and that's the Nazca Lines.  Other than that, the place is pretty much a wasteland. So what are the Nazca Lines?  Well, no-one knows exactly.  They are huge geometric designs drawn in the desert and only visible from the air.  They were made by the simple expedient of removing the darker sun-baked stones from the surface of the desert and piling them up on either side of the Lines, thus exposing the lighter coloured soil (heavily laden with gypsum.  Some of the Lines represent giant animals, others are geometrical shapes and still others are strange humanoids. 

Questions still remain: Who constructed the Lines and why? And how did they know what they were doing when when the Lines can only be properly appreciated from the air? 

My theory is martians in league with Elvis.    Anyway ... checkout the photos.

20 year Cessna in surprisingly good shape.  Thick coats of paint hide wing cracks and other metal fatigue damage.

The Condor

The Condor again from a different view.

Astronaut or martian

Monkey

Hummingbird

Spider

Bird of some sort. Can't remember which.

No idea what this is either.  Could be a bird but the beak sure is funny looking.

Cemetery of Chauchilla

Thirty kilometres away from the Nazca Lines is the Cemetery of Chauchilla.  Lying out in the open desert are bones, skulls, mummies, pottery shards and fragments of cloth dating back to between 1000 and 1300AD. 

Still can't get over seeing human remains lying out in the open as you work from excavation to excavation. 

Desert

Dead person.

Close up of dead person.  Probably female judging from clothing, hairstyle and the fact that even in death, she still has her mouth open and is yabbering away. 

Doesn't look good in the morning either.  More proof that woman deteriorate over night.

Hippy dead dude.

Skulls. Cool.

More dead people.

These guys had incredibly long hair. Wow!

Cute little dead dude.

"I'm rich and horny baby!" 

Other Shots

Miniature owl at a traditional pottery factory

Old yank tank lying in the corner of the yard at the local gold mining museum.  Love how the colour of the car seem's to match the colour of the mud brick walls.  I have no idea what the original colour was.