Nazca

Nazca is only a very small town in the middle of the peruvian costal desert and is normally only a brief stopping off point to visit the famous Nazca Lines, but i really liked the town, it had a certain rustic charm to it.

We arranged a short flight in a tiny 3-seater front-propellor plane to appreciate the Nazca Lines to their full.  The lines are a series of geoglyphs etched into the Nazca desert 1000s of years ago.  The etched figures range from simple lines and trapezoids, to complex figures of monkeys, hummingbirds, dogs, spiders and even an astronaut.  Due to their immense size you really need to see them from the air in order to recognise the figures, so that's what we did.  The flight lasted about 30 minutes (involving some pretty hairy turns in the plane to ensure that we got a good view) and in that time we flew over all of the main figures.  They were pretty hard to spot at first, the pilot would point them out and i would be staring down at the mass of desert below us and then suddenly i would spot an amazing and huge sketch of a lizard or a monkey, just laying there, etched into the sand.  It was fascinating to see these enigmatic lines, about which historians are still undecided as to their purpose.

The next day Gemma and I set off on a sandboarding trip.  We had to vacate our room by 12, after having had only 4 hours sleep (as we were partying hard the night before with the locals in a cute little bar we found) - this is the problem about getting night buses, having to be homeless for most of the day without recourse to a bed or shower, usually just when you most want one!  We were feeling pretty zombie-like when we started the trip, but the excitment of speeding along dirt-track roads in a dune buggy soon woke us up.  Nazca is actually overlooked by the highest sand dune in the world (just over 2000m high), but for our first try at the sport we were taken to a sligtly smaller range of dunes.  Our driver had lots of fun driving up and down and around the dunes, slowly climbing up so all you could see was sky as we teetered on the edge before suddenly plummeting down the other side - great fun, just like being on a rollercoaster ride!  The actual sandboarding was fantastic.  We started off on a smallish dune for a few practice runs - laying down and speeding down the dune head first and then progressing to going down standing up (or at least trying to.  The hardest part was actually walking back up to the top for another go!) - and then progressed to a huge dune for some serious speeds.  By the end we were completely covered in sand, it literally finds its way into every single possible orifice!