Sept 22 - Sept 24
Elevation 1952 ft

Lima to Nazca

Bus - Roundtrip Lima-Nazca-Lima

Lima to Houston
Continental 591
Departs Friday, Sep. 24 - 11:45 PM
Arrives Saturday, Sep. 25 - 6:20 AM

Things to See and do:

Nazca Lines

Wednesday, September 22

We arrive at the Lima bus station. We’re riding on a Cruz del Sur bus and we’ve booked first class seats. Yes, the buses here have a first class section. It was $7.50 more than the regular fare. After now experiencing first class bus service, Travis isn’t sure if Doug will ever travel on a bus in regular class. The lower section is just 9 seats, all for first class and we’re completely isolated from the rest of the bus’ riff-raff. It’s almost pleasant. But it is a scheduled 6 ½ hour bus ride. Whose idea was this anyway? The odd thing is that first class isn’t full, and we can’t imagine not paying the extra money for first class seats if they’re really that much more comfortable and it’s that much more relaxing, but we guess that most people just don’t have the extra money.

The problem with this bus ride is that it’s 6 ½ hours on a bus, which is about 5 hours too long to be on a bus. And that 6 ½ hours really turned into over 8 hours. UGH! Torture! The countryside was not much to look at. This is all brown desert. There are portions where you can see the Pacific Coast, but other than that, there’s not much to look at. We were both bored to death within about 2 hours.

We arrive in Nazca at about 9:00 pm. We bypassed the taxis and walked the 3 blocks to the hotel (we’re guessing most tourists don’t do that because we didn’t see anyone else doing that).

We check-in, throw our bags in the room, and then head out in search for dinner. Luckily Nazca has a fairly lively nightlife, but most places close at 10:00. We find a busy restaurant near the main plaza and have steak and chicken. It’s pretty good.

Off to bed we go.

Thursday, September 23

We get up and have breakfast at the hotel.

We’ve been debating back and forth about the weather. There are two Nazcas in Peru and they have different weather patterns and we can’t figure out for the life of us which one is which. Last night we guessed that we were at the colder Nazca because it was slightly on the cool side when we arrived. When we got up this morning, we realized that we were in the warmer Nazca because it was already warm. That’s fine with us because we’re in the mood to wear shorts today.

We have three tours scheduled for today. We meet our driver/tour gide, Ronaldo who first takes us to the Chauchilla Cemetery. What’s located here are desert buried mummies! This is a pre-Incan cemetery that was used between about 200-900 AD. It was discovered in the 1920s, but it had already been plundered by grave robbers for the really good artifacts. They took all of the good pottery, textiles, and precious metals. The graves have been reconstructed as best as they could with what was left. There are a total of 250 graves at this location, 12 of which were reconstructed for tourists.

The next stop on Ronaldo’s tour is the Aquaducts of Cantayo. There are 20 of the wells at this location and a total of 56 locations where wells such as this are loated. This is the only one available to tourists. These are really pretty fascinating. The Aquaducts are really just big wells, but they were constructed in a method so that you can walk right down to the water, rather than haul the water up in a bucket or something like that. So they were built with a spiral ramp leading down to the water and the walls are flanked with really big river rocks. We’ve told you how little rain this area gets, so any water they do get has to come from an underground aquifer. It’s probably pretty easy to tell were the aquifer runs, because you will occasionally see a line of green trees out in the middle of the desert. They have to get there water from someplace. The Aquaducts connect the wells together and divert the water to places that they want the water diverted to. They are still in use and serve some of the local farms. We see a watermelon farm close by and also a cactus farm. They grow the cactus for the prickly pears that they pick and sell for food and there is also a bug that is attracted to the cactus that they harvest and use in cosmetics. Ronaldo says that once a year (when it’s the dry season in the Andes), they have a group of people that go in the aquaducts and clean them and reset any of the stones that have worked themselves loose. The locals also have a yearly festival at the Aquaducts.

We learn that water situation in Nazca is quite perilous. Their rainy “season” is maybe two hours long each year. Some years they get no rain at all. Their average annualrainfall is somewhere in the 1 cm (0.4 inches) range. The residences here only have two hours of running water a day. Most residences have a water storage tank so they can have some water in their homes outside of those hours.

Ronaldo then takes us to a local pottery shop. This wasn’t listed on our itinerary, although we do have some idle time to kill, but we suspect it’s a tourist trap. There a local artisan who goes through the pottery making process that was done in the old times. They didn’t have a wheel to spin, but they did use moulds and several local minerals to get different colors. It’s fairly interesting. Some of them look quite similar to the pottery that we saw back at Museo Larco.

We’re then off for our flight to see the Nazca Lines. We booked a special tour where we get to see the Nazca Lines in addition to the Palpa Lines. There are literally hundreds of figures in the desert and thousands of lines. The figures are made by clearing the rocks where you want the visible line made, not by actually making the lines with the rocks. This is a desert that gets very little rain fall and there’s not a lot of wind. You can move a rock and it will stay put for thousands of years unless someone or something decides to mess with it. It’s known who made the lines (the pre-Incan civilizations who lived in this area) and how they made the lines (moved the rocks), but there’s still a lot of controversy on why they made the lines. The three most popular theories are that they were made for astronomy purposes, that they were made for irrigation, and that they were made for ceremonies and festivals and to tell their Gods that they are remembered.

We finally get matched up with our pilot, Marco. We have a co-pilot whose name we don’t catch and we’ll be taking the tour in a 4-seater Cessna. The co-pilot makes a point of showing us the barf-bags in the seat backs. There should have been ominous fore-shadowing music playing. We taxi, get the clearance, and off we go!

We first go through the Nazca symbols. Doug’s sitting on the left. Travis is on the right. The pilot is making figure-8s so both of us get a chance to see the figures and lines and take pictures. The Nazca symbols are the most popular and most people see those. We see the spaceman, and the dog and the monkey and the spider and the spiral and the hummingbird and several others. We finish up the Nazca symbols and head to the Palpa symbols. The Palpa symbols are very similar to the Nazca ones, but they’re much older. We get to the first Palpa symbol and the pilot dips down and then Travis starts feeling rather poorly. By about the third symbol, he’s has full-blown (no pun intended) motion sickness. The pilot stops dipping the plane down on Travis’ side and we’ll just have to rely on Doug to take the rest of the pics. There are 15 or so Palpa symbols that we see (well, Doug sees them). The more popular ones are the hummingbird and "la familia Paracas". We finish those up and head back to the airport. Our feet hit the ground and Travis starts feeling a lot better.

Our tour with Ronaldo is over and we head back to the hotel to rest a bit (Travis needs to stop moving around for a while). We head out and finish some lunch and then go back to the hotel to finish up the Lima leg of the website. We have a pretty lazy afternoon and finally head out for a late dinner back to the same restaurant we ate at last night next to the plaza.

Friday, September 24

Today we head back to Lima for our flight back to Houston. It involves another very long bus ride. We’re hoping that traveling in the daytime will be faster than traveling at night, but we’re still mentally prepared for another grueling day of travel. Depending on how long the bus takes, we have a 2-4 hour layover at the Lima airport and then we’ll be getting on a plane heading back home.

We have breakfast at the hotel, finish packing, and then head to the bus station.

As it turns out, the bus takes a really long time. We make good progress until it turns dark and we get to Lima. The traffic in Lima is just incredibly bad and at one point we sit in the middle of an intersection for about 20 minutes without moving. There are cars just pointing all directions and it really seems like total gridlock. We're a bit worried as we really have no idea whether we're anywhere close to the bus depot. We think we have plenty of time, but when you're not moving, you just don't know. We ultimately make it and get a cab to the airport. Even though it's well after 8PM, there is tons of traffic and even the cab driver sighs with relief when we ultimately get to the airport. We get checked in, pay our departure tax and are on our way.

We can hardly believe that this is the end of our trip. We’ve both had a good time, and we’ve seen some really cool things, but we’re probably ready to get home (but not go to work!). We both miss Tex-Mex food and ice tea and being able to drink water straight from the tap. We're also very tired of hearing honking car horns. We hope that you’ve had a good time following along with us too. See you soon!