I did it, I did it, I did it, I did it!!!!!!!!!!

I had two new "firsts" today; I took my first ride on a five person plane, and had my first experience vomiting on my own shoes. The upside to experiencing my first air-sickness was that as soon as the nausea hit, the anxiety completely disappeared, and the downside seems self-explanatory.

We took an early morning flight over the Nazca lines, mysterious pre-inca carvings in the desert rocks of various geometric shapes and drawings such as a whale, a monkey and even an alien. It was very cool and I was handling the whole thing very well, considering my extreme phobia of flying. Dair was very sweet, randomly petting my hand and telling me that he was very proud of me, but as the pilot listed from side to side to ensure that we could all "see everything clearly", I suddenly started to turn a very ugly shade of green. Something about being turned on my side, so that the window was literally facing directly down at the etching we were to be looking at, followed by a sharp veer the opposite way to make sure the other half of the plane could also see the ground, some how did not agree with my body. That's when the audible praises of how well I was doing started to become paired with under the breath mutterings of "please don't throw up, please don't throw up". I did make it back to the ground and all the way back to the hotel "batroom" before I missed the toilet by about fifteen centimeters and my shoes suffered their first victimization.

We then checked out some mummies in the desert where we got to see our first "sand devil"- a mini-tornado that picked up the sand and danced around in front of our car for a couple of minutes before dancing away- which was awesome! Yeah, the mummies were fine, too.

Nazca, which literally translates to the title of this blog post, is named such because they receive a total of 30 minutes of rain per year. This means that we finally got to see the sun!! The afternoon was spent lazing around the pool of an expensive hotel with our new "Hollandaise" friends and then hitting the planetarium for an explanation of the strange southern skies we'd been looking at. I now know that it was not just my imagination, but that the Big Dipper is indeed upside down over here.

Since there's really nothing else to do in Nazca, we took an overnight bus, with a different and far superior company, to Arequipa. It turns out that when traveling in Peru at night, the whole "directo" part is a little more important; something about banditos and guns. While curious in theory, when considering the reality of it, we decided to pay the extra soles for the tourist bus. Money well spent.

We're here in Arequipa now, staring at "el Misti" the sleeping volcano as I write this, and making our next move in the very early morning; which of course means more ramblings very soon.