Nazca Lines and Drive to Arequipa

Monday November 7

There are no quiet hotels in Peru. We've given up. This morning it was roosters and some guy on a megaphone at some ridiculous hour. Bright and bushy-tailed we got up at 6 am for our flight over the Nazca Lines. For those of you not familiar, they are large ancient geoglyphic pictures drawn on the desert floor, very ancient, done by the Nazca civilization, and the pictures are only visible from the air. Did they have airplanes back then? Were they done by aliens? Nobody knows. There are hundreds of them, some of the shapes we saw included a spider, a hummingbird, a dog, an astronaut, a baby condor, a whale, and a monkey, among others. The two of us were put in our own plane, a little cessna 4 seater. The pilot flew quite low and banked the plane 45 degrees to one side so we had a good view, then turned and did the same for the other side. At one point the pilot released the controls, turned around and grabbed our camera, and took pictures of us. The lines were fascinating to see, but by the end of the flight our sunburned faces had turned green, and one of us actually had to use the barf bag, and was the better for it. We won't say which one, but the other one had to lay with his head in his wife's lap for part of the long drive today.

We set out for Arequipa for a long 12 hour drive, with a few stops along the way. Great stops! First we went to a pre-Inca graveyard, from before the time of Christ. There were about a dozen pits with mummies and bones in them. The mummies looked short and squat because they were wrapped in fetal positions with the heads sticking out. Lots of them still had their hair. They were all placed facing east.

Another stop was along the Nazca Fault Line, which we drove parrellel to for awhile, and then crossed over. There are 2 tectonic plates pushing against each other, which has caused a great chasm in the earth, and lots of earthquakes in Peru. It is part of the Ring of Fire.

We took a 2 km detour off the main road for a lunch stop in Puerto Inca, a wonderful resort on the coast, in the middle of nowhere. Lunch is the main meal here, which we often don't eat until 3:00, and then there is no supper. So we snack a lot.

Most of our drive today was along the coast and we had wonderful views of the ocean and the waves crashing into the rocks. Absolutely beautiful. Well worth the long drive.

The desert went on for hundreds of miles. Sometimes there were sand fences that kept sand off the roads, and sometimes they irrigated the sand to keep it from drifting.

Along the road people have built little shrines that look like doghouses, indicating the spots where people have died. There are tons of them. Especially when we were driving through the mountains and there were hairpin turns. We started gaging how dangerous the turn was by how many shrines were there. Some turns had dozens. We did lots of passing today. At one point Pabel passed a truck as it was passing a truck. On a hairpin curve. We decided we would decorate our shrines with little Canadian flags flying from them. Yesterday we saw a funeral procession, with a flowered decked out hearse leading the way. Then throngs of people following the hearse and carrying the casket in the air.

We were stopped 4 times by "random" police checks today. Pabel had to show papers and explain what we were doing there. That can't be too great for tourism. We saw a bunch of large tour buses, not really private vehicles like what we have. An 8 seater van.

Arequipa is a huge city, I think the 3rd largest in Peru. We are no longer in the
desert or along the coast. We marvel at the intersections where people are coming from 10 different directions and there are no stop lights or stop signs. In Peru only some of the drivers have drivers licences. To get your licence, you need to pass 3 tests. A written test, a road test, and a psychological test. Too bad they don't have those back home!

Sent from my BlackBerry.