The Journey to get to Nazca from Cusco takes a whole day, is long and very dull, by flight from Cusco to Lima then a transfer to the bus station and the best coach I've ever ridden in with Cruz Del Sur. (It was like a plane! Movies on demand and a hostess serving food and drinks, but with leather seats and lots of extra room!) I pull back the curtain now and then to look at the passing landscape with the sea and its rolling waves on my right side and the desert on the other. Arriving at Nazca bus terminal after 8 hours on the bus I pick up my bags and wait for my guide to collect me. He walks me accross the road, litterally 30 steps away to my hotel the Alegria. My hotel is good with electricity and hot water, and a tv, two double beds and lots of brown 70's style furnishings. In the morning there is a buffet style breakfast with bread, ham, cheese, jams, avocados and fruits and juices. and I seem to be one of just 4 or 5 people in the entire hotel. Its hot here already at 8am and I love it. The restaurant area is a three sided part of the building which leads out to the courtyard area where there is a pool and a small garden with such beautiful exotic flowers and cacti. This place has only 5mm of rain in an entire year, but I think these flowers have a gardener to look after them! The reason I'm here is to see the Nazca Lines. Until the 1930's Nazca was like any other small Peruvian town, with no claim to fame except that you had to cross one of the worlds driest deserts to reach it from Lima. Since then the Pampa, a dry plain north of the city, has become one of the greatest scientific mysteries in the Americas. The Nazca Lines are a series of drawings of animals, geometric figures, and birds up to 300 metres in size, scratched onto the arid crust of the desert and preserved for 2,000 years owing to a complete lack of rain and to unique winds that clean, but do not erase, the Pampa. These huge figures can only be properly appreciated from the air. In 1939 a US scientist Paul Kosok, flying over the dry coast, noticed the lines, previously believed to be part of a pre-inca irrigation systemn. Being a specialist in irrigation he quickly concluded that these had nothing to do with water systems. By chance the day of this flight coincided with the summer solstice and so on a second flight Kosok discovered that the line of the sunset ran tandem to the direction of one of the bird drawings. He called the Nazca Pampa 'the biggest astronomy book in the world'. Maria Reiche was a young german mathematician who became an expert on the lines after meeting Kosok when she was 35 and was encouraged by him to study the Pampa. Reiche devoted her life to studying the lines, which she measured, cleaned, analysed and charted daily from the air and from a 15 metre high platform. She developed the most widely accepted theories on the hundreds of drawings that cover a 50km wide belt between Nazca and Palpa describing them as an astronomical calendar. Because the drawings are only visible from the air there are those who do not accept Reiches theories, denying that the Nazca people would have drawn something they could not see. The Most Damaging theory came from Erich Von Dainken when he published 'Chariots of the Gods' where he proposed that the Pampa was part of an extra terestrial landing strip. Von Dainkens book drew thousands of visitors who set out across the pampa on motorbikes and four wheeled drive vehicles, leavind unerasable marks. Consequently it is now illegal to drive or even walk on the Pampa. Reiche used the profits from her book 'Mystery on the Desert' to pay 4 guards to keep a constant watch on the plain. She died in 1998 and is buried nearby. Her house has been turned into a small museum. I am driven to the Maria Reiche airport and I join a group of 4 people from Argentina. They speak a little english to me and we take some photos outside the little plane before we get in. The tiny plane seats 6 passangers and 2 crew but theres just 7 of us today. My place is at the back of the craft on the right side. We have all been placed due to our weight. We all have headphones so we can hear the co-pilot talk about what were seeing as we go along. After a quick take off and after just 3 or so minutes we come to our first line, The whale. Its quite difficult to spot. Up here I can see plainly the sharp straight lines with what seems like the imprint of where an alien craft may have landed! They seem to be landing strips or important triangles which are no way there naturally or by accident. These mean something. Eventually after watching the others in front point to the whale below, I spot it. Its fainter and much smaller than the triangles, but very intricate and beautiful, by the time I see it with my own eyes we're over it and I don't manage to get a picture of it. Next we see more distinctive triangles, the Trapzoids. After that is a very sweet Spaceman seemingly carved into the side of a hill. The plane leans to one side and circles over the shape we're looking at so everyone on that side can get a good look, then it switches sides and circles again so everyone on the other side can see it too. Its a bumpy and stomach churning ride, but the views are incredible. We see more lines, the dog, the monkey (who looks like he is climbing some stairs), the hummingbird, the spider, the condor, the frigate bird, the flamingo, the parrot, the hands, the tree and what looks like a lizard. By this point its about 25 minutes into our 30 minute flight and I'm feeling very unwell. I vomit into a sick bag on the return journey to the airport and am very glad to be back on solid ground. So what are the lines all about? I'm still not sure, but they really are worth seeing. That was an amaing experience. I am driven back to the hotel where I have a coke, put on my swimming stuff and sun bathe with a book. I'm the only one by the pool. My bites are still bothering me, but they are improving. I am picked up in the afternoon and taken to the second place I visit here, which has a lot of history too. The Necropolis of Chauchilla, a graveyard in the desert. My guide, Carlos, takes me 20km south of Nazca and then over a dirt track road for another 7km. I should be worried as it feels like were just driving into the desert, but the surrounding beauty of this derest is amazing. I love the heat too. Eventaully I see a small building, the entrance to the archealogical site of Chauchilla where I pay my 8 soles fee to visit. Carlos leads me through the first few tombs and I'm struck by how open they are, there is no cover, no protective glass, no temerature control. They're all similar to how they found them, not more than 6 feet down. After the discovery of the Nazca Lines, tourists came, and at that time the cemetery was extensively plundered by huaqueros (grave robbers) in the 1940s and 50s who left human bones and pottery scattered around the area. Carlos tells me the people burried in this cemetary are believed to have been those who made the lines. There has been 5 civilisations in Nazca. These bodies are from around 200AD - 500AD and are still present here today in front of my eyes. They are mostly skeleton and cloth, however some of the skin and hair is still visible on the bones, the face, the feet, a babys leg. The bodies are so remarkably preserved due mainly to the dry climate here in the Desert but the funeral rites were also a contributing factor. The bodies were clothed in embroidered cotton and then painted with a resin and kept in a seated position in purpose-built tombs made from mud bricks. The resin is thought to have kept out insects and slowed bacteria trying to feed on the bodies. This may account for the high degree of preservation seen in these thousand-year-old+ bodies which still have hair and the remains of soft tissue, such as skin. Carlos lets me hold a piece of ancient pottery, likely to be over 1500 years old. I feel like Indiana jones. He leaves me to walk through the rest on my own. I walk through the sand between each covered pit of now open graves and peer over the barriers at them, 12 sites in total. It looks like there could be many more under a dip in the sand somewhere nearby. I can see sticks stood upright in the sand in the distance, perhaps this was the markings of the entrance, so easy to find back then. Despite all this, I have an incredible feeling of peace. I love this heat, this desert, even in the middle of this graveyard, I feel so happy. The nearby hills are so colourful, with reds, whites, greys and browns, likely from the iron, magnesium and other minerals within them. For a moment its just me and the silence and the breeze, utterly at peace. There are small piles of stones. The wind whips up now and then and creates some tiny twisters in the sand, smaller than me, and its really fun to watch. Carlos meets me at the end with his car and we travel back to the town. Im feeling really tired from the journey and being ill this morning. So I go back to the hotel and watch some spanish TV drama about a magic white rose bringing wishes to people before falling asleep. The following morning I get up early and walk into the town to the Plaza del Armas for some shopping before I return to Lima on the Bus. Its hot again and the shop keepers are sweeping out the dust from their shops onto the streets. The cars here are noisy and beep their horns at everything. I think that might be the whole of Peru that behaves this way though! I sit in the Square and take a moment to people watch, its nice here in the garden area. The buildings away from this square are more squalid and are sometimes three sided and not entirely completed, even my hotel looks like it stopped progress before building the third level, perhaps thats how they make stuff here. with a view to expand someday. I buy some souveniers and return to my hotel before going back to the bus station and heading north to Lima.