Nazca, Peru
Behind Alien Lines
The Nazca lines are 2000 year old carvings made into the ground by an unknown people. To get to them you have to travel deep into the dessert. Discovered in 1927 by Toribio Mejía Xesspe, a Peruvian Archaeologist.
The only way to appreciate them is to view them from the air. So I chartered a small plane from a local agency, Aero Paracas, named after the nearest city.
Aero Paracas is a great way to test the limits of your stomach. To view each drawing you do two fly arounds on opposite wings. Altogether you view 32 different drawings in one hour, so you’re basically banking for a whole hour.
When I saw all the tyre tracks, and even a road running through the lizard I felt the overwhelming feeling of seeing two cultures interacting, thousands of years apart. Like the timeline of the universe laid out in front of me.
Flying over the Nazca plains, you also get a sense of the vastness and peculiarity of this desert. An arid badland that stretches for 450 km2, wind rushing like water across its dry soil, one of the places in the world that records a huge abundance of alien sightings.
