The Nazca Lines

Bright and early, we're on the road with Pedro and on our way to Nazca!  He has arranged for us to go directly to the airport to fly over the Nazca Lines!  En route, we pass through many small towns, desert, mountains and valley's of lush green life! It is a beautiful day!

Dejan stops to check out the plane, prior to boarding, she's a little Cessna 6 seater, it's going to be a cozy ride!

To provide a brief excerpt from the book... the Nazca Lines are spread across 500sq km of arid, rock stewn plain in the Pampa Colorada (Red Plain). This is one of the worlds greatest archaeological mysteries.  Consisting of more than 800 straight lines, 300 geometric figures and concentrated in a relatively small area, some 70 animal and plant drawings, the lines are almost imperceptible at ground level.  It's only when viewed from aove that they form their striking network of enormous stylized figures and channels, many of which radiate from a central axis.  The figures are mostly etched out in single continuous lines, while the encompassing geoglyphs form perfect tirangles, rectangles or straight lines running for several kilometers across the desert.  

The lines werw made by the simple process of removing the dark sun-baked stones from the powdery gypsum-laden soil below.  The most elaborate designs represent animals, including a 180m long lizard, a monkey with an extravagantly curled tail, and a condor with a 130m wing span. 

The whale is in the centre of this photo with the line going straight through it.

This is referred to as the Astronaut, because of it's goldfish-bowl-shape head, though some are of the opinion that it's a priest with a mystical owl's head.

The monkey with the twirly tail

The humming bird

A partial shot of the condor, in the top left of the photo

There is viewing tower off the road, and on either side you can make out (left) a tree, and (right) hands, or some people say a frog - depending on how you look at it.  These two are a bit smaller than the rest and are just visible from the viewing tower.

 

The parrot (although I don't really think it looks a whole lot like a parrot!)

We saw even more than this, but not all the photos are completely visible. Pretty amazing! Lots of different theories from one local to the next on what these are all about - the one thing they all agree on - it's pretty amazing!

Adios!