First this morning was a special treat, a short flight to view the Nazca lines from the air.
A number of different companies operate flying tours to see the famous glyphs - lines drawn in the sand. They all charge the same and have stringent safety regimes in place, so our five seater plane had two pilots and four of us in the back, arranged by our weight. We were given headphones to wear so that we could listen to the co-pilot commenting and it was cool to hear them talking to the control tower - sounded more like a space flight though.
I guess the flight took about half an hour and we flew over around a dozen of the glyphs - for each of them we banked at 45 degrees so that we could get a good view and take photos, and then we turned and banked again for the other side. So my stomach started feeling queasy and I had to abandon the attempts to take photos...
The humming bird was probably the most impressive - about 100 metres wide and with a series of lines representing the wings and tail. We saw the other famous ones too - the astronaut (probably a priest rather than an astronaut...) and the condor. It was also great to see the landscape - very arid and crisscrossed by lines in the sand. A week or so before, Greenpeace had caused massive controversy by unfurling a banner near one of the glyphs, but it all looked normal this time.
The Nazca Lines have a reputation for mystery - how could a prehistoric civilisation be able to know what they would look like from the air, and what they had been created for. It was interesting to compare with contemporary construction we knew from home - Stonehenge, Callanish - and to appreciate the effort that had gone into creating them.
Back to earth, we took a quick shopping trip to buy some provisions (toasted sweetcorn was the big hit) and headed out for the long journey south - 10 hours.
Driving through the desert, we came to the Nazca Fault Line - showing the seismic activity along the coast of Peru. The fault line runs for several hundred km and gets wider all the time. In one of the oasis towns we stopped at an olive shop and tasted delicious large olives from a plantation nearby.
Most of the journey was along the coast and we were treated to an exhilarating and sometimes nerve-wracking ride along the coast road. The road was cut into rocks and even built on the side of a massive sand dune, with hairpin bends, few passing places and large oil tankers travelling both ways. The coast was almost absolutely deserted, and the contrast with the areas of green where a river flowed into the sea was spectacular. Occasionally we saw monuments for people who had died in accidents, including one from when the Paris-Dakar rally took place on this route, complete with model car. (The car and driver were never found.) Also a number of bleak one-horse towns where not much seemed to be happening.
The last two hours we turned inland and drove in darkness up to Arequipa, the second city of Peru, which is 2400m above sea level, so quite a steep ascent. As we came into the city, the centre looked beautiful, with its main square and cathedral illuminated. After we checked in at the hotel, Sion went straight to sleep (the ceviche from two nights ago having been identified as Chief Suspect for his indisposition) and I went to the pizzeria at the end of the street and ate a meat pizza in about 10 seconds, before going straight to sleep.
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