The Lines

The pictures are:

1. If you look close you can see the space man

2. White lines

3. Vision dreams of passion going through my mind-oh different white lines

4. Eva recovering from the flight

5. The spider in in statue form

I've been doing so many things in this part of the world in the last week or so, I had to take a break from my South America stories. Yesterday however was relatively uneventful though so it's back to Peru.

I left off in the desert oasis of Hucachina. Eva and I stayed there only one night and then we took a bus the next day a few hours farther south to Nazca. Nazca is famous because of the "lines" of the same name. There are many theories about the lines and why they are there. Some of them are:

1. Pictures drawn in homage to the gods

2. Directions for alien landing sites

3. Indications as to where to find water

4. Astrological representations

The lines were not "discovered" until the first half of the 1900's when a plane flew over it. Often when we say things were "discovered" in reality the local people have known about them for years. Not in this case though, as they don't look like much from the ground, and it needed the invention of the plane to be re-discovered. The lines are thought to be over 2000 years old and again their purpose will never really be known.

Some of them are just straight (some are over 6 miles long) lines and some depict images like a monkey, a condor or a "spaceman." They are constructed by simply moving the darker surface rocks to one side, exposing the lighter silt underneath. It barely ever rains there and that is how they are able to stay for so many years.

We couldn't really go there and not see it, so we took a 35 minute flight over the lines, that cost about 50 USD each. The plane was a four seater that held us, and Aussie named Jed and the pilot. Eva made it about 3 minutes into the 35 minute flight before she started throwing up. She proceeded to do so for the next 32 and mostly only saw the lines through watery, miserable eyes. She can laugh about it now by the way. The pilot spoke English, but not perfectly. When we were turning he would say to Eva "lady close your eyes" but sometimes he would mix open your eyes and close your eyes, causing Eva to open up during a tight turn, not helping the situation.

I actually felt a bit nauseous as well. So the experience was..............good? Well, it was something we wanted to do, and now we have seen it. We decided to take our only night bus of the trip from Nazca, heading to Arequipa. But we had about 10 hours in Nazca to kill. Before the flight we were thinking to go see a bone graveyard, but afterwards, Eva needed some chill time to feel better, and we really just hung out in Nazca. We did also go to a lecture about the lines in the evening, and then headed to the bus station around 10:30 to await our night bus.