With the insanely overpriced Ica behind me I hoped Nasca wouldn’t be in the same situation for Semana Santa. I wasn’t sure if Nasca was a place people went for the holiday break and with Semana Santa almost over I had high hopes for find a decent hostal at a decent price.
My wishes were answered and the first hostal I checked out was empty and the prices had dropped because everyone had left to go back home. Awesome! After dropping off my backpack I wandered around town. Nasca is a great little place to visit, like many smaller towns in Peru, the Plaza de Armas comes alive at night with people chilling out and children running amok until all hours of the night.
There was also a small craft market for Semana Santa still showing off their wares with local music piped through speakers. It’s really just a pleasant way to sit and watch life meander by.
The next day I headed out to the airport. The reason you come here to Nasca is to see the famous lines. And the only way to really see them is by air. After lashing out $90 for the flight and waiting an hour and a half, I was called up. A massive group of about 20 Japanese tourists had arrived and they squeezed me, two Japanese and a German fellow onto the plane.
The planes are just small Cessnas. They sit 4 of us tourists plus the pilot and co-pilot. Once boarded the plane spun up the propeller and we blasted down the runway and took flight. With the plane being so small you feel every single movement. A little bank here, a small dip there, it’s quite jarring at first and it takes a little getting used to. The advice from the hostal was not to eat breakfast
before going and I can understand why, I could imagine people getting sick from sharp turns when circling some of the glyphs.
The Nasca Lines are spectacular, if not a little surreal. Looking down at them it’s hard to be impressed at first, thinking anyone these days could make them. Then you have to let your mind adjust to the fact they were created some 1500 years ago without the advantage of flight, then the sheer magnitude of their design and scale overwhelms you.
The lines are a mix of shapes, animals and the abstract. There are so many theories as to their purpose and how they were constructed it seems like an actual answer will never eventuate. For some them you can imagine how they would have been made, the astronaut for example is on the side of a hill and it wouldn’t have taken too much effort to create. Others, like the monkey and the condor, are so large and distant from any hill it boggles in the mind to figure out how they were constructed. There is literally no point of reference to view them from and it would have taken a mathematical feat to map out the detail, from spiralling tails to perfectly parallel lines, all done from the ground with no way of seeing what it looks like from above.
After landing I caught a ride back into town with the German from the flight. He was a fairly miserable guy that nothing much impressed him. Parting ways after we reached town I had to bum around until midnight for the bus to Cusco. After
dinner I stopped at a bar that was blaring out Metallica. After a beer a Lima local joined me and it was clear he was already pretty drunk on pisco sour. Several drinks later and after his attempt to climb a telegraph pole, I went back to the hostal for my bag and chilled out at the bus terminal waiting for the bus.
A 13 hour luxury bus ride later I arrived in the tourist capital Peru, if not all of
South America – Cusco. Clutching my wallet I prepared for the inevitable assault on my bank account, and entered the town.