And Breathe...

Day 75-76: Nazca, Peru. The plane dived hard to the starboard side, the note of the engine increasing in pitch as the revs increased on the little six seater Cessna. I did my best to hold on to my camera and to my breakfast as we switched direction yet again to get the best view of the amazing geoglyphs that stretched infinitely across the desert floor. “Beats dizzyness!”, Karen joked above the noise of the aircraft. She was right: Trading altitude sickness for motion sickness within a 24 hours period was not one of my better ideas!

After almost 5 weeks at high altitude, we finally decided to give our lungs a break and descend to the Peruvian desert floor where oxygen was considered to be a commodity rather than a luxury. Heading south-westerly from Cusco, we caught the overnight bus service to take us across the High Andes and down to the tropical coastal plateau. Whilst covering a distance of only 350 miles, this was unquestionably one of the most difficult bus journey's we had ever undertaken; 15 solid hours of mountain passes, ascents, descents and death defying hairpin bends before we left the gargantuan mountain range that has played such a huge part in our South American adventure.

Arriving on the western side of the Andes at the dead and alive hole of Nazca, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this desolate pampa would hold little of interest for anybody. And indeed this sun-bleached expanse of desert was largely ignored by the outside world until 1939, when North American scientist Paul Kosok flew across the desert and noticed a series of extensive lines and figures etched below, which he initially took to be an elaborate pre-Inca irrigation system. In fact, what he had stumbled across was one of ancient Peru’s most impressive and enigmatic achievements: The world-famous Nazca Lines, which as a teenager, I had been fascinated with ever since reading a copy of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World.

Spread across an incredible 200 square miles of arid, rock-strewn plain, the Nazca Lines remain to this day one of the world’s great archaeological mysteries. Consisting of more than 800 straight lines, 300 geometric figures and some 70 spectacular animal and plant drawings including such entities as the hummingbird, the spider, the condor and the astronaut(!), the lines are almost imperceptible at ground level. It’s only when viewed from above that they form their striking network of enormous stylized figures and channels up to 300 feet across and so Karen and I just had to get up there to take a better look.

With little else to do in Nazca, finding a willing pilot with a light aircraft to charter is,well, as a easy as jumping out of a plane. Finding one that didn't want to empty the contents of our stomachs through their demonstration of aerobatic prowess in an attempt to get you the best possible view of the lines, much less so!!

Emerging from the plane, both looking a little green, Karen and I had gained a much better appreciation of the intriguing geometric shapes drawn by the Nazca people some 2,000 years ago (it definitely is an astronaut, you know!). But right now, we had a desire to be back in the High Andes where, despite the lack of oxygen, our internal organs tended to remain in exactly the same place that we had left them!