Friday, April 29, 2011

Nazca

It was hard to leave the pretty oasis town of Huacachina, but due to the less than stellar hotel staff, we were off to Nazca where we could spot a few of the famous Nazca Lines.

We decided not to take a plane tour of all the lines, seeing as we were informed that the planes frequently crash and numerous people have already died this year. This is due to poor plane maintenance and questionable piloting; however, we have been informed that harsher restrictions are now being enforced, including the requirement of two pilots. Still, it was not a risk we were willing to take to see a few large drawings.

Luckily, there are a couple of view points that you can get to via taxi, so we got to see two of the giant ancient pictures.




Nazca has actually quite a few historic site attractions, including this ancient water system, consisting of miles of these connected spiral water pits.


Our guide was insisting that we try the water, but our stomachs had other ideas!



One of the large spiral pits.



Nazca is known to have the largest sand dune in the world - which is the absolute monster of a dune seen in the background behind the mountains. It is called Cerro Blanco, and is over 2000m above sea level. If you are crazy enough, you can take an expensive tour where you walk up one of the sides for over 3 hours to get to the summit!


There were many cactus fields surrounding Nazca... which stopped us from frolicking in the meadows.







We climbed some ruins in the desert heat, the significance of which was not explained to us, but I assume they are also Nazcan and old.







This is why they are called "ruins".








We only spent one day in Nazca, and that was enough for us. The town itself was a bit of a dust pit, full of over-priced restaurants and tour companies. We were just happy our hostal had a swimming pool, which is greatly needed after walking around in the desert heat all day!

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