Nasca, Peru – mysterious lines in the desert
by Richard
A hop, skip and a jump south again (or a few hours in a plane) saw us land in Lima the scary capital of Peru. My last visit had been 4 years ago and was the first place I’d ever stepped foot in South America. The taxi driver at the time advised me that I wouldn’t last 5 minutes on the streets around my hotel without being mugged. It seemed less intimidating this time now that we were hardened, street wise travellers. The taxi descended the coastal road around the outskirts of the city and then rose up into Mira Flores (gringo land) where we dined on pasta inside a 24hour supermarket and I joyously found crunchy nut peanut butter.
The Peruvian coach down to Nasca the next morning was comfortable, modern and the driver handled it with kid gloves. It seemed that bus travel in Peru would not be accelerating our grey hair accumulation. The coast sped by on the right, and barren sandy hills on the left. Satellite tracking of the coach to guard against hijacking meant that when Kate urgently needed a loo stop, the driver had to radio in to headquarters for clearance. Whilst we waited I looked down on the omnipresent industrious sellers of mandarins and nuts under the petrol pumps.
Nasca is a small messy, dusty town with a strip of tourist restaurants along one street and hostels dotted about town. Our “Walk on Inn” hostel was superb.
The next morning we boarded a tiny 6-seater plane and took to the skies above the famous Nasca Lines (330B.C.-A.D. 700). We clenched our teeth together as the small plane banked hard to the left and then to the right as we circled around the ancient drawings for the next 30 minutes.
Fortunately in anticipation, our light breakfast and motion sickness pills saved us from needing the sick bags, despite sounds and smells from behind us, as the other couple spent the whole flight re-producing their breakfasts and climbed out of the plane clutching a good litre of vomit each!
The Nascan’s made 70+ animal and plant drawings so big (up to 300m in size) that they can only be appreciated from the air. Experts have puzzled over them since 1929 when they were first spotted from air traffic. Especially about how they were drawn so precisely without any means to view them from above.
The Spaceman – this one is on the side of a hill and looks like an astronaut waving.
The Hummingbird – this looks to me quite near the hills, so was it perhaps overseen from above?
Chick - the lines were made by removing darker sunburnt surface rocks to expose lighter sand underneath.
Monkey with spiral tail – some theories suggest that some drawings represented constellations in the night sky.
Condor – most experts think that the drawings were of animals sacred to the Nascans, for the gods to look down upon.
There are also hundreds of mysterious geometric lines and shapes, probably made long after the drawings because some of which criss cross the pictures and are 30m wide and 9.5km long.
Maria Reiche studied the lines for 50 years and concluded that they created a giant astronomical calendar where lines tracked the rising and setting of major stars on the horizon, the sun at solstices etc. These allowed calculations of planting and harvest times.
Some areas could have been used as platforms of sun worship where broken fragments of drink containers lie.
In the evening we attended a fascinating lecture about Maria Reiche’s theories and saw Jupiter’s three moons and our own, through a powerful telescope.
Left: the tail of a drawing points to the setting sun at summer solstice.
Below: our moon through the telescope taken with our little Canon Ixus digital camera.
Tags: Cusco, Machu Picchu, Nasca Lines, Peru, trekking