Nazca, Peru

Nazca is famous for the Nazca lines, a number of very large (up to 5km long) images created in the desert up to 2500 years ago. There's not much else here, and since it took us 9 hours to get here from Lima by bus we decided to splash out and see the lines from the air in a tiny plane, as usual we got a cheap last minute deal!

Apparently you can see the lines from various hills around about, but I'd be surprised if it's possible. We were surprised how difficult they were to see from a plane flying around at 45 degrees!!

Our bus should have taken almost 2 hours less to get here, but the driver crashed the thing!!

This is taken from the back of a taxi in Lima en route to the bus station. We had got on a bus from Miraflores heading for the centre/bus station but we realised we'd gone too far so got off and jumped in this taxi. The driver went through some of the roughest parts of anywhere I've ever seen.

This is the bus we get to Nazca, note you have to go through a metal detector before you get on. This particular part of the bus does not look so good a few hours from the time this photo was taken!!

We go through a village called Menorca before...

...the driver hits a barrier on a bend in the road!

We're held up for over an hour for some reason.

We arrive in Nazca around 10pm, it's Saturday night so we have to go out! There was a small band of 3 people playing in this pub (you can just make out the guitarist on the left), the locals were having a ball - I had to pick one of them off the floor when he keeled over!

An old street vendor selling individual cigarettes.

Craig before we board!

The Dutch couple that were also on our plane, and the co-pilot.

Pilot and co-pilot in the front, just the four of us in the back.

These are the images we fly around, shown on a card in the plane. We do see most of them, but they are much fainter then we expected and our photos weren't great.

Triangles that don't appear to be all that impressive but they were created over 2000 years ago and are thousands of metres in size.

If you look hard enough at the dark part close to the centre here you can see a figure, this one is known as the astronaut.

The same picture cropped.

"Humming bird"

Look closely at the centre...

...and you can see the "spider".

'Parrot', I think!

Typical restaurant.

The "Plaza de Armas", the centre of Nazca.

Craig took us into the worst pub on the planet. We realised shortly after sitting here (I didn't sit on that chair!) that that thing to the left of Craig was the 'gents' toilet! I don't know if there was even a drain there as the piss was running down the floor. There was a constant stream of blokes standing there doing their business!

We have a 10 hour bus journey to endure today on our way to Arequipa, Peru's second largest city, but still only a tenth of the size of Lima. I'd be looking forward to it if the bus was leaving, and hence arriving, earlier - we arrive at midnight.