Up at 530 for Juan to take me to the bus station where I boarded a fancy double decker tour bus. I think I was even in the first class area! The seats were bigger and there was a tv, but aside from that it was just a bus. I tried my hardest to sleep, but a very loud French couple talking and the noise of Avatar in Spanish on the tv weren't very condusive. We made our way south along the shore to Pisco (source of all those wonderful pisco sours) and further inland to Ica, where we stopped to drop off most of the other passengers, and on to Nasca. It was a 7 hour ride, all told. The scenery was desert, bare rock mountains and the occassional dash of color on a river valley (one of which contained the first mango tree I've seen!). Finally reaching Nasca, I found Raul and loaded my stuff in his Honda. We headed to the airfield on the edge of town for my fly over of the Nasca Lines. The plane was a little Cessna with 4 passenger seats and I shared it with a Peruvian couple and their daughter who spoke a fair amount of English. A captain and copilot took us up, across town and out into the famous plains west of town. The lines are giant pictures made moving rocks and soil, so that the lines themselves are lighter in color than the plain. They were made by pre-Incan societies sometimes in the first 6 centuries AD. The flight path took us over the biggest and most distinct pictures, including the monkey, humming bird, condor, tree, astronaut and toucan. This involved circling around each one, first one way for the right side of the plane and then the other way for the left side. By the end of it, I was feeling pretty queesy, but managed not to use the in-flight bag ("one liter, no more"). It was incredible to see these figures I've been interested in since high school. The landing was almost sideways due to the high winds, but successful none the less. Afterwards, Raul took me to a local pottery shop where they faithfully recreate pieces of pottery that the line builders made. They were very nice, but I would have no way to get them home in one piece so I just looked. We drove a bit north of town to see some giant hill carvings made by a different culture around the same time. These were all of humanoid characters and could be seen from a metal watchtower. We headed north to Ica (about 2 hours) where my hotel awaited. Raul's English and taste in music was very good, so we talked the whole time. Checked in at the hotel and on Raul's advise, headed up the street to a different hotel's restaurant to have some tacu tacu, a regional dish of rice and bean paste, covered in peppers and onion. That and a pisco sour flavored with an unknown fruit that made it blue and I was well satisfied. After dinner, I intended to wander around the lake central to this resort town and see about climbing one of the giant sand dunes that surrounded the whole town and hid it from the rest of the world. Instead, I was waylaid by boisterous hippies, who demanded I stay and have a drink with them. I think it was mainly to sucker me into buying them drinks and maybe some of their hemp necklaces, but I didn't mind. They turned out to be a lot of fun and I talked quite a bit with Juliette from New Zealand, as she spoke English. At 38, she had been making necklaces and bracelets and selling them to tourists all over Peru for 3 years. What wildly different paths we follow! I took my leave and climbed that sand dune, only taking about 40 min about it. The view from the top was nice and the only time I got to see the southern stars. Sandy and tired, I returned to the hotel and slept all of 5 hours.