The Long Road to Lima

The Cessna for the ride to see the Nasca lines

For our last day in Cusco, we mostly just relaxed and handled logistics. At 4:30, our bus left for Nasca. The ride took 15 hours and it was a fairly comfortable bus. It wasn't as good as the one we too to Mendoza in Argentina because the food was worse and the seats didn't lie completely flat. Also, the route winds up through the mountains with a lot of switchbacks. At one point we had to take motion sickness pills. As the crow flies, it's only 350km, but it's slow going. In the end though, we managed to get a decent amount of sleep and arrived in Nasca around 7am.


More pictures are in the Peru album.

The spider Nasca lines figure.

In Nasca, we were greeted by the intense desert heat. A shock compared to the cool high Andes. We rendezvoused with the tour operator for our flight, which wasn't for a while, so we had a leisurely breakfast. The flight had four passengers, a pilot and a co-pilot. It was in a small Cessna and lasted about 30 min. Of course, we weren't going anywhere, we were simply seeing the Nasca lines. These geoglyphs were built by the Nasca people in the desert about 2000 years ago, probably for religious reasons. The desert in the area is pure desert with absolute no scrub or other vegetation, just rocks and sand. The lines are made by raking the rocks, which are darker, away from sand, which is lighter. Doing this, they made gigantic figures that can only been seen from the air. Some of the figure were of animals, like monkeys or spiders, while others were geometric figures. The flight allows you to see them very clearly, but it is a little stomach wrenching because the pilot with circle each figure from both sides with the wing pointing at the figure. It's a very incredible landscape.

The aqueduct access points in Nasca

The first bus we could get to Lima wasn't until 4pm, so after our morning flight, we took a lackluster tour that took us to see one of the lines up close, to an Incan mud ruin and to the aqueducts  The aqueducts were the highlight. The water in the area is all groundwater and river water, so to make the valley fertile for farming, people built this incredible aqueduct over 1000 years ago. It's an underground tunnel with a series of helical access points that are used to get water and to access the tunnel for cleaning. Amazingly, like all the ancient public works, it has survived very well through many major earthquakes.

Though we didn't visit it, I should mention the Cerro Blanco. It's a sand dune that can be seen from town. It's not just any sand dune. It's the biggest in the world at 1100m from its base to its tip. Sand buggies can't get up to the top, so if you want to, it's a 3hr trek. Then, you can sandboard down the hill. A little nuts.

At the end of the day, we hoped on the bus to Lima. It's a 7 hour ride that felt a lot longer because the bus attendant had a thing for dancing movies and it wasn't possible to turn the sound off. So, we were subjected to a marathon session of Spanish dubbed Step Up movies. In the end, we arrived in Lima late after 22 hours on the bus and crashed.