Ancient lines in the desert

Forced smiles seconds before take-off

Light aircrafts are not for the faint-hearted. I can see why they put the sick bag in the pouch in front of you.

Within hours of stepping off the overnight bus from Arequipa we found ourselves a couple of hundred metres up in a six-seater, one-engine aircraft banking to the right to see the lines stretching out below us.

It was the best way to see the huge pictorials below created hundred of years before the Incas, etched into the rocky ground. We saw geoglyphs of a spider, a monkey, a hummingbird, a condor, a tree and even an astronaut(!). The reasons for their existence, however, are still unknown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_Lines).

A geoglyph of a hummingbird in the Nazca desert

The journey itself was pretty bumpy and loud - the sound of air traffic control in our headphones interspersed with the guide pointing out another creature in the desert as we banked sharply to one side and then the other.

A steep left bank anxiously witnessed by my mother