Share Nazca, Peru
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A really quiet little town that has a couple of things to do but the main reason to go is to take the smallest plane you have ever been in and fly over the famous Nazca Lines.
Museum Antonini
With an afternoon to kill we headed to the museum in town. It’s pretty small but is jam packed with things inside. If, like me, your Spanish is awful then you get a book in English to carry round with all the translations.
I have the attention span of a gnat so after reading the first 3 boards of information out of around 30 I gave up to just ‘look at things’. I was always a visual kind of learner anyway.
What I did find out was they knew how to celebrate cutting someones head off (smash a bit of string through the skull and hold it up) and how to paint their pottery. Two very different life skills there but I imagine in those days two very important ones.
Nazcar Lines
The whole build up to the experience was a mixture of nerves and excitement. Both for the exact same reason that I had never been in a plane so small before. Reading about how the tour companies used to cut corners and a few people died years ago didn’t help either. Since then though there have been tighter regulations and all flights must have a pilot and co pilot on board.
That being said walking out and standing next to the plane that was not much taller than me I wondered how it stayed up there at all. We met the crew and the other couple that were doing it with us then got strapped into our seats. The plane only has room for 6 people (2 pilots and 4 passengers) and even that is a little bit of a squeeze.
Once we took off though I sat back to enjoy the experience for the 35 minutes we would be up in the air. We passed over all of the lines which are remarkable for how old they are and the detail. There was the monkey, spider, tree, hummingbird, whale and many more. The advice for photos was to find the lines with your eyes first, then point the camera if you are quick enough.
I managed to get some half decent pictures of some of them but other were either too small or I wasn’t quite quick enough.
After about half way into the flight even I felt a little sick. It was like being on a 35 minute roller-coaster with the the plane being tossed about in the wind. Every pocket of air and the plane would drop 2 feet before repeating every 30 seconds.
I’m not one to suffer any type of travel sickness but this was almost the one that tipped me over the edge. So close to having to use that little bag but luckily I hung on in there and made it back to solid ground. Maybe another 10 or 15 minutes in the air and it would of been a different story.
A great experience and the memories will be way better than the photos, though if you don’t now what they look like have a Google!