who cares about pluto…

With several days to kill after the tour, we decided to head to Nasca. The main attraction there is the lines in the desert near the town. We stayed a night in a crazy little hotel in Lima, and liked it so much we booked another night for when we came back. The bus ride down was definitely worth the trip, as we passed through some of the areas worst affected by the recent earthquake. It was easy to see why so much damage was done, with so many houses made of mud brick they didn’t stand a chance. Most of the real brick buildings were still standing, though not all. In many towns there were many tents along the road set up as makeshift homes. Very sad to see, when these people already have so little.

Arriving in Nasca was an experience in itself. A dozen pushy people turned out to try and con us out of our already booked hotel. A simple no wasn’t enough to get rid of them; they pretty much followed us until we walked in the doors of the hotel. We booked ourselves a flight for the next day and went to bed.

The flight the next morning was fun. I haven’t been in a little cessna for years, and this was definitely a small plane flight. To give us good views of the lines, our pilot tipped the plane from side to side for the entire flight. By the end I was feeling a little off, and I’m pretty good in planes most of the time.

We saw all of the lines with varying degrees of clarity, the best being the hummingbird. The best photo anyway…

We went for a walk around the town in the afternoon. Nasca comes off as a lovely little place, with many places to eat on the side of the street. The one we picked was excellent, and of course extremely cheap. There didn’t appear to be that many tourists around, perhaps they were staying away from the south because of the earthquake.

We booked in for a walk up Cerro Blanco, the worlds highest sand dune, the next morning. It was certainly quite a trek, with a break from walking to ride down the dune on sandboards in between. Sandboarding is hard, well I found it hard anyway. It is completely different to riding on snow, with increased pressure slowing one down. This means that you DON’T lean forward unless you like the taste of sand. I don’t particularly like the taste of sand, but had some anyway until I learned to lean back. Here’s one of me once I got into it a bit, complete with dodgy moustache.

The walk back to the road took forever, and we’d run out of water which didn’t help. The trip was still worth it, being pretty much the most arid place I’ve ever been, and that includes Canberra. In the evening we headed back to Lima and our kitcshy little hotel. Earlier I’d seen some bottles of Pisco being carried on board, which I figured were prizes for the bingo they play. Thinking I’d quite like one of these I couldn’t get my sheet fast enough when the lady came asking if we wanted to play. Twenty four spanish and english numbers later, I called bingo! and was the proud owner of a bottle of Cruz del Sur labelled bottle of finest Pisco.

The rest of the Nasca photos are here.