On Monday we had another long drive day to Puerto Inca, a weird little beach resort where we camped for the night. It was deserted apart from some vultures - cant be holiday season right now?! The sea is apparently very dangerous with a really strong current. Someone from another tour group went missing fairly recently and the body still hasn't been found - yikes! Camped on the beach for the night but even had a hot shower in the morning!

On the way to Nazca we stopped at Chauchilla Cemetery - bit of a macabre place but fascinating! It was discovered in the 1920s, but had not been used since the 9th century AD. It's been looted and a lot of the valuable stuff has been stolen over the last however many years. The bodies are really well preserved because of the dry climate but also because they were clothed in cotton and then painted with resin and kept in purposely-built tombs made from mud bricks and covered with wooden beams. Anyway, they were all a bit spooky as you'll see on the pics - on some of them you could still see the boy tissue - yuk!!

We then arrived at Nazca - famous, of course, for the Lines! They were only discovered in 1939 when a scientist flew across the desert and saw the mysterious lines/drawings. They are spread across 500 square km of arid, rock-strewn plains and there is a network of 800 lines, 300 geometric figures and 70 animal and plant drawings. The best designs include a monkey with a curly wurly tail, a spider and then a weird looking figure that's apparently an astronaut carved into a rock. The formations (so they say) were made by removing sun-darkened stones from the surface of the desert to reveal lighter stone underneath. It's still not known, however, who constructed the lines and why - and even moreso why as they can only be seen from the air. Of course there are various theories such as aliens, interpretations of dreams brought on by hallucinogenic drugs, giant running tracks (eh?!) and that they were ritual walkways connected to some kind of cult. Who knows eh?

Anyway, I paid the extortionate fee t get into the tiniest plane in the world - some turboair jobby - it was seriously the size of a Mini and had 4 seats plus the 2 pilot seats but they were like old car seats (but were patterned with the Nazca Lines). I was with 2 people scared of flying who thought the man on the ground was actually holding up the wing as it was so unstable!! They then panicked that the windows were still open as we took off and honestly, if there had been parachutes, I think they would have used them. Still, once in the air they remembered what they were here for and straining to identify the lines took their minds of everything! They are actually very hard to make out - I still haven't seen the whale which was the first shape - I don't think I really knew what I was looking for. Thought I may have taken a picture by mistake so I could see it afterwards but alas, no such luck! The main problem was that there were so many other lines on the ground, it was difficult to distinguish what you were supposed to be looking for. Anyway, what you see on the photos is just about what we saw but it was interesting to witness this weird phenomena!

Myself, Vee and Michelle had upgraded for the night as we were camping in the grounds of a hotel (well, you can't seriously expect me to camp when there's a nice comfy bed with ensuite staring me in the face, can you?!) so we chilled out by the pool in the afternoon, drinking obscenely strong pisco sours.