The final highlight of our tour of Peru took place during our 2-night stay at Ica where we were given the opportunity to take a flight over the mysterious Nazca Lines. These are located on a desert plateau called the Pampa which stretches from Ica in the north down to the town of Nazca, about 80 miles to the southeast.

This desert plateau has been called “the greatest scratch pad on earth” because it is littered with a staggering collection of geoglyphs - huge lines, shapes and drawings that were scratched onto the desert surface around two thousand years ago by the ancient Nazcans. There are wide ranging estimates as to exactly how old the lines are but they all agree that they were created over a long period of time - at least 500 years.

The lines can be divided into three distinct types: the biomorphs, the geometric shapes and the straight lines. The biomorphs are the drawings of birds, fish, animals and insects and have been shown to be the oldest of the lines and are probably the most famous. There are around 50 of them which makes them the least common type. They come in various sizes from just 25m all the way up to 275m. One characteristic that they have in common is that they have each been drawn using a single, uninterrupted line which never crosses itself. This seems quite deliberate and has led to theories that the lines were used as ceremonial walkways.

These biomorphs, however, are dwarfed by the sheer number and phenomenal size of the geometric shapes and the straight lines. There are around 300 geometric shapes and around 800 straight lines on the Pampa. The geometric shapes include enormous triangles, rectangles and trapeziums that are hundreds of metres wide and thousands of metres long and these huge shapes often cross or interconnect with each other for complex but so far unfathomable reasons. The straight lines are quite narrow but they are usually many miles long and perfectly straight with the longest being about 9 miles (15km).

The Discovery of the lines

These geoglyphs are located in a barren, inhospitable desert and most of them are so large that you would be unlikely to spot them from the ground if you didn’t know they were there. It’s therefore not surprising that they weren’t discovered until after the aeroplane had been invented.

They were first spotted when commercial aircraft started to fly over the region in the late 1920s. Passengers reported seeing what looked like aircraft runways on the desert surface below. However, these lines and figures weren’t really studied in earnest until 1939 when Paul Kosok, an American scientist, set out to determine if these lines were part of an ancient irrigation system. They weren’t. However, by pure chance, it just happened to be the winter solstice and he noticed that the sun set exactly at the end of one of these long lines. He immediately concluded that this desert was “the biggest astronomy book in the world”

The purpose of the lines has been the subject of much speculation since their discovery but nobody has dedicated as much time and effort to solving the riddle as Maria Reiche. She was a German mathematician who worked as Paul Kosok’s Spanish translator when he was presenting his theory on the lines. She was fascinated by his findings and ended up dedicating the rest of her life to studying and protecting the lines until she died in 1998 at the age of 95. She spent almost 60 years mapping out the lines and drawings and developed Kosok’s theory that the lines were a giant astronomical calendar by attempting to pair up each line with a celestial body on a significant date. She also suggested that the animal drawings represented the constellations as viewed by the Nazcans. This “astronomical calendar” theory attracted the attention of an astronomer called Gerald Hawkins in 1965. He fed the data on the lines into a computer but failed to find any correlation between them and the celestial bodies other than what you would naturally expect to occur by chance.

How were the lines drawn?
The Pampa is covered with a layer of dark coloured stones that have been baked into a lighter coloured and relatively soft sediment. To make their lines and drawings, the Nazcans simply cleared away the darker top layer to reveal the lighter sediment leaving the cleared stones along the edges of the lines which helped to increase their contrast.

Wooden stakes have been found marking out the lines and these suggest that the Nazcans drew their long and very straight lines using the following simple method: two stakes are placed a long way apart with a rope stretched taut between them along which the first part of the line is drawn. A third stake is then placed a similar distance away from the second so that it is visually in line with the the first two. The rope is then stretched between these two stakes and the line is continued along it. This can then be repeated for as long as the line needs to be.

The designs used for the biomorphs are similar to ones found on pottery and textiles from the same period. The Nazcans were very skilled at weaving designs on textiles using scale drawings and it is thought that they used similar skills to copy their designs onto the desert using larger scale drawings. This method has been successfully used to reproduce a full sized copy of the Condor - one of the largest of the Nazcan designs.

Ever since the lines were discovered, people have been suggesting theories about why the lines and drawings were made. We read a lot of articles about the lines, while writing this page, and found the most convincing explanation on an excellent BBC TV documentary web page as well as on a Discovery Channel web page. These web sites both show that the purpose of the lines was related to water after all - a very rare commodity in this region. The lines have been shown to radiate out from underground or temporary water sources. If you want to know more, we encourage you follow the links.

© Aero Condor - Peru A stylized map of the area we flew over. This is not to scale - the drawings are shown very much larger than they really are.

Our flight over the Nazca Lines cost us an extra $130 each (about £81 each) because it was not included in our tour itinerary. This seemed a little expensive but it is something that you just have to do if you get the opportunity and most of the people in our tour group agreed. The planes were quite small, so we had to be split between three flights and we were given the choice of taking an afternoon flight (as soon as we arrived in Ica) or waiting until the following morning. We picked the morning flight as our guide book said that this was the best option because winds often make the afternoon flights uncomfortably rough.

It took our plane about 20 minutes to get to the first of the lines. The Nazcan geoglyphs are spread over an area of about 175 square miles (450 km²) but the most famous drawings (the biomorphs) are concentrated in a relatively small area which is what we flew over. Each passenger had a window seat and our pilot gave us a good running commentary on what we were flying over. We saw absolutely loads of long straight lines and geometric shapes along the way including the long trapeziums that Erich von Däniken suggested were alien landing sites. However, our pilot was actually navigating us around the many drawings of birds, insects and animals and we saw pretty much all of the famous ones. At each drawing, the pilot would circle around so that all passengers got a good view regardless of which side of the plane they were on. The flight lasted an hour in total and was surprisingly smooth. However some people (including Lina) found the way that we circled around each drawing quite nauseating and one woman was decidedly ill when we landed.

One of the things that we didn’t get from our flight was a sense of scale - not even when we saw trucks driving along the Panamerican highway that slices through the area. It would have been really good to have seen at least some of the lines from ground level. Almost everything we had heard or read about them said that these ancient pictures could only really be seen from the air. This has spawned theories about alien visits or that the Nazcans were capable of prehistoric flight. However, while we were researching before writing this page, we found out that these drawings are actually not as big as you might think! Apparently, all but the very largest of these drawings can easily be recognised from ground level. We even found some rare pictures with people standing on or beside some of the lines where the whole of the design is clearly visible to them. This definitely takes some of the mystery out of the lines.

To give you some sort of feel for their size and visibility consider that all but the very largest of these drawings would quite easily fit onto a standard football pitch - most of them with plenty of room to spare. Now imagine a pitch where the grass has grown a couple of inches but somebody has used a domestic lawn mower to cut a very large outline of an animal through the grass. Do you think you would be able to see and recognise this animal “drawing” from the side line? We think so.

We had a little trouble taking pictures of the drawings from the plane as our camera’s autofocus had problems latching onto the almost uniform desert. We still managed to get some good pictures but these then turned out to be quite hard to scan in - the automatic settings, which are normally quite good on our scanner, produced dark, very low contrast images which needed a lot of trial and error adjustments to make the drawings stand out. We have provided a selection of our pictures on this page with their approximate sizes (if known). You can click on any of them to see a much clearer (and bigger) view.

These lines have survived unharmed for thousands of years. We are only able to ponder over them today because this desert is one of the driest places on earth. Virtually no rain falls on it and the winds can’t redistribute the dark stones because they naturally sink into the softer sediment and get baked into place. Sadly, the very same factors that have preserved the these lines so well will also preserve the damage that was done to them during the 1960s and ’70s when hordes of people drove across the soft desert to take a closer look at what they had been led to believe were alien landing sites. The tracks their vehicles left behind will be preserved for posterity just like as Nazcan’s mysterious lines have been.

Our two-night stay in Ica included an afternoon excursion to a nearby desert oasis called Laguna de Huacachina followed by a guided tour around the museum in Ica. The rest of our stay was free for us to enjoy the many activities provided at our hotel. This made it an excellent place to unwind at the end of our tour.

We stayed at the Hotel Las Dunas which is named after the massive sand dunes that it is built near. One of the unusual activities available at this hotel is “sand surfing” down these dunes. I (Chris) had a go at this and by far the hardest part was climbing to the top of the sand dune because for each step forward I would slide almost all the way back! Maybe there is a trick to climbing sand dunes but I didn’t master it. When I finally reached the top, I was absolutely exhausted - not just from the sheer effort but also from the intense desert heat.

I had absolutely no idea how to “sand surf”, and there was nobody around to copy, so I initially tried to imitate snow boarders by pointing the board across the dune thinking I could zigzag down the dune. However, I couldn’t move at all using this method so I gingerly pointed the board straight down the very steep dune with absolutely no idea as to how fast this board might go. I expected my feet to disappear from underneath me and to fall all the way to the bottom of the dune and get completely covered in sand along the way. I needn’t have worried though. When I started moving it was at quite a sedate pace. I had absolutely no trouble keeping my balance until I foolishly tried to steer when I fell over instead of turning. I had just enough energy for one more go and I picked a much steeper section of the dune this time. This started off almost vertically but I still didn’t go very fast. I managed to stay upright all the way this time but I didn’t make it to the bottom of the dune as there was just too much friction.

After the sand surfing, we cooled off by messing around in one of the hotel’s three swimming pools (the one which had a water slide). We also used their full sized pool table, had a go on their trampoline and went for a cycle ride around the hotel grounds. We could have also gone horse riding or played various racquet sports if we’d wanted.

After our stay in Ica, we returned to Lima for our last night in Peru before taking the long flight back home. We drove back in a luxury coach along the Panamerican highway but we took a short detour to Paracas on the way so that we could take a boat trip out to the Ballestas Islands (Islas Ballestas).

Our boat took us past another geoglyph carved into the cliff face on the Paracas peninsular. This is called the Candelabro because of its alleged resemblance to a huge candelabra. However, we thought that it looked more like a giant cactus which actually turns out to be one of the more popular theories on what it is supposed to represent. Another possibility is that it represents the ancient Peruvian’s version of the Southern Cross constellation as it points due south. Little else is known about its purpose. It isn’t even known if it is younger or older than the Nazca lines.

We saw thousands of seals and sea lions on the Ballestas Islands near Paracas

The main purpose of our boat trip, however, was to view the teaming wildlife on the Ballestas Islands. The star attractions were the thousands of seals and sea lions that live on these rocky islands. Our boat cruised around the islands giving us a good view of these aquatic mammals basking in the sun. We were also lucky enough to see some of them swimming around in the water and even occasionally jumping out.

These islands are also home to what must be millions of sea birds. These were mostly gulls but there were also some cormorants and we also managed to see some of the shy Humboldt penguins - which would always waddle off and hide when they spotted us watching them. These penguins are only able to live so far into the tropics because of the cold Humboldt current that runs up the coast of Peru (which they are named after). We also saw a massive condor scavenging around on the islands and on our way back to the mainland we saw a huge flock of flamingoes and some pelicans.

Well, that’s almost the end of your virtual tour of Peru. If it has given you an appetite for Peru then why not follow the link below to read about Peruvian food.