Nazca Lines

Heading towards the end of our magnificent South American adventure, Condor Travel picked us up from our hotel in Lima and we drove down the coastal highway along the Pacific Coast to your hotel in Ica.  So far in Peru, we had experienced the jungle and the mountains, now we were in the desert.

The local airport was built as a regional hub, but is only used for the flights over Nazca and the occasional medical emergency flight.  It felt odd being in a huge, empty airport.

I suffer terribly from motion sickness, so I took the necessary tablets before the flight, prayed hard and was fine (thank you Lord!). 

 It's a gentle hour-long flight out to the Nazca lines, then the pilots do some scary twists and turns so that everyone gets a chance to see and photograph the ancient formations in the desert.    

The Nazca Lines are a series of large ancient geoglyphs in the Nazca Desert, in southern Peru. The largest figures are up to 370 m (1,200 ft) long. They were designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. The high, arid plateau stretches more than 80 km (50 mi) between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana, about 400 km south of Lima. Although some local geoglyphs resemble Paracas motifs, scholars believe the Nazca Lines were created by the Nazca culture between 500 BC and 500 AD

Back on terra firma, we overnighted at the Hilton DoubleTree Resort