We arrived in Nasca about 7.30am.  Slept pretty good thanks to the sleeping pill and only awoke a few times thanks to my big Peruvian friend beside me hogging the arm & foot rests, he beat me in the elbow wrestle :-(

We went straight to hotel, quick shower and change and then out to the airport for our flight over the desert to view the Nasca Lines!

We were all a bit nervous about the flight thanks to one of the girls telling us about a dream she had where she was at the Nasca airport then decides last minute not to get the flight and it crashes!!!

Turns out she isn't psychic and we all lived :-)

The lines were amazing and cover the desert as far as the eye can see!

Some shapes and others just lines.

The co-pilot pointed out to us the shapes of hands, parrots, condor, spider, monkey, tree, astronaut and we would circle on an angle in each side of the plane so we all had an opportunity to see them.

Some weren't as large as I expected so hard to spot ... Tried to photograph them too but not sure they came out so great?

We went back for a nice relax for a couple of hours by the pool then a few of us did a tour of the Chaunchilla Cemetery.

It's out in the desert and they only gets 30 minutes of rain per year, (second driest place on earth after Attacama Desert in Chile). It was a very windy afternoon so we walked about getting stung by the sand and covered in it ... Not a good day to wear lip gloss.

They had a tiny museum with some
artifacts, but most exciting a mummy in a glass cage! 

 The population here pre dated the incas and were known as Inca Chincha.  They dated from 600BC to 200 AD and the ones in the cemetery were believed to have been royalty.

After our guide gave us a great detailed explanation in the museum, we moved outside to visit the 12 open grave sites ... There's hundreds there but these are open due to grave robbers stealing the mummies clothes and artifacts buried with them. They think everything has already been stolen but reburied again.

The open graves were linked by paths made of white stone, and either side of the stones were more graves, and the sand dipped from where the ribbers had been.

There was a lot of white cotton cloth & bone around everywhere that had not been re-buried,  even one mummies hand was still sticking out of a pile of cloth like something out of a horror movie and it was climbing out of the grave!

Each open grave had a small attempt at preservation by having a timber sun cover built over it and the area bordered off from tourists with ropes.  It wasn't really much to save it from the elements and preserve it for study & future generations but heck - welcome to Peru!

The graves were easily found to be robbed as they were only just below the surface and had stone walls that the grave robbers could find by pushing metal spikes into the ground.

Inside the open graves you could see