An overnight bus was taking us from Cusco to Nazca and we picked a pretty good one for the overnight 13hr trip. We caught the bus at 8pm and after the in service meal, which I had all of mine and most of Jo's, I fell asleep watching and English movie, dubbed in Spanish, but with no subtitles.
I woke at 6ish, still on the bus and reached passed Jo to open the curtains and revealed nothing like I had ever seen before. Australian dessert at least has some plants and scub, but this place was devoid of anything. We were still at 3000m, according to The Watch, and over the next two hours we dropped 2500m down into Nazca.
You've seen it before, but its a cool shot.
It was hot in Nazca, after Cusco, so we went outside in the sun in search of some breeze. We had booked a flight through the hostel to fly over the lines at 2 pm, a taxi would pick us up at the front of the hostel at that time and the girl on the front desk would let us know when he got there. Lucky for us that we were back at the hostel at 12.30, because the car was waiting to take us out to the local airport.
Pulling up to the airport, well across the road from the airport, we were taken to an office where we paid the $50us, for both, and told to wait. We were starting to get a bit worried after half an hour, plus we hadn't seen the guy we paid the money to since we paid the money to him, when another guy came up to us and said ' come with me'. He happened to be the pilot and he was leading us to a very small 4 seater plane.
It was at this time that Jo decided to tell me that small planes freak her out. Great..... I tried to explain to the pilot that I wanted to go up with someone else, but his English had deserted him and I couldn't get my message across. We piled in to the plane, and headed off down the runway. As soon as we were airborne, the pilot started to explain the Nazca Lines to us, and since I don't speak great Spanish, just four words, he must have remembered how to speak in English.
This one was the hummingbird.
The Lines themselves are truly amazing, the condor has a 120m wing span. Nazca is one of the driest places on earth, which is why there is so much still left for us to see. We also got to see Nazca's only other attraction, the biggest sand dune in the world. And since it was dwarfing the nearby mountains, I wasn't about to dispute their claim.
That was the problem with Nazca, in about 35mins we had seen just about all there was to see. We headed into town to check out the main drag. Nothing happening down there, so we went to get a bus ticket for the next morning, only problem was that the only buses out of there were night buses. The prospect of spending all the next day in Nazca was too much so we tried getting a bus that night to Arequipa. We wanted to get the hell out of Dodge, that was the feeling that we got from the place, a frontier town that probably hadn't changed much in 100 years.
A bus station was found but this is where our next problem was. We walked into the station only to be told ' no, no the computers are down '. We walked into the next place, only to be told ' no, no the computers and mobile phones are down '.The power had been going on and off all day, and right then it was off. So maybe Nazca had changed in the last 100 years. I found it a bit strange though that they were reliant on computers to book us a ticket out of there.
When the Guinea pig runs out......?
So we walked up the street in search of dinner, we had been told to try again for a ticket in an hour. I saw a guy clinging to a ladder scraping something off the side of a building. What made me look twice was the fact that he was all tangled up in the power lines, but since he wasn't doing a funny little dance, I concluded he wasn't the cause of the power problems. I wished I had got a photo of that.
The computers were still down when we got back, but the guy there had managed to get through and book us on a bus for 11pm. We went back to the hostel to tell them that we weren't saying after all. The girl on reception didn't seem surprised she just shrugged and said with a smile ' there isn't much to do in Nazca'.
So we arrived at 8am and were on a bus out of there by 11pm having seen all there is ( not quite true ).
I think the slogan should read........ Come to Nazca, there's not much to do!
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