The Nazca Lines & Sandboarding

Ela fouf, and hello mother and father, hope your all enjoying the newest photos. It's fun sending up-to-date photos for all three of you to see.

After Porta Inca we continued down the coast to Nazca, to see the famous Nazca Lines. The lines are like giant sketches on the desert floor and were created by the ancient Inca's. There's various theories as to what the lines and drawings are, such as that they are a giant ancient calender. They are also so large they can only really be send from the air, which raises questions over how they were made.

Due to the fact they can only be seen from the air we all booked onto a light aircraft flight over them. We were warned that to see the giant drawings properly requires the pilot to throw the aircraft around alot, and they weren't joking... I have to say by the time the flight finished I was feeling more than a little queezy.

Me & Marco and the light aicraft


Hopefully you'll be able to make out the various shapes we saw. They weren't always quite so well defined against the desert floor.

The Alien


The desert floor

The spider

The humming bird

The tree

After flying over the lines we went to a nearby Nazca cemetary, where the mummified bodies of centuries old Nazca people are preserved. I have to say I found the cemetary trip all a little strange, looking at the mummified remains of people who died hundreds of years ago all felt a little wrong, like we shouldn't really be looking at them.

A mummy in the cemetary museum

The Nazca people used to bury their dead with offerings for them to take to the next life, as they believed this existance was only the beginning and therefore didn't fear death.

Remains in the actual cemetary


After visiting Nazca we headed on to another town relatively close by up the coast to camp for the night. On our arrival in the late afternoon Neil had arranged for us to go Sandboarding and Dune buggying. Both were amazing, sand boarding involved 'sledging' on your front down giant sand dunes... and sand buggying involved driving really really fast up, down and around massive dunes in the below vehicle. It was alot of fun and we managed to catch the sunset too.

The dune buggy

Me enjoying the breakneck speeds

Dunes, dunes...

and more dunes

The dunes we sandboarded down were huge, and alot of fun.

Neil contemplating the next run

Marco zooming down a dune

Lovely pink skies

Sunset over the dunes