A couple of weeks ago I was working on revamping the travel section of our web site (which you can see here) and it occured to me that there were a good many places that Holly and I have been to, but have never written about. Not cool! Over the next several months I'm going to work to resolve that… starting today, with Peru.
As a kid I was fascinated by UFOs and the thought of extraterrestrials (I can neither confirm, nor deny, that I still have this fascination). My favorite commercials on TV at the time were for the Time-Life book series, Mysteries of the Unkown, which looking back on now, were incredibly cheesy (they always came on during the Unsolved Mysteries TV show and MacGyver). Anyway, in one of the commercials it described the Nazca lines as having been made by aliens and then subsequently discovered by World War II pilots as they were flying over the country (the first of which is likely not true, and the second of which is absolutely not true). Cheesiness aside, the images and the idea of the lines stuck with me, and so when Holly and I began planning our trip to Peru, it was a must see. And no, before you ask, this is not the only place we've visited because of my fascination with UFOs.
The lines themselves are not hard to get to, but they're not particularly easy to see. The city (town?) of Nazca is situated about 6 hours or so South of Peru's capital city, Lima. Holly and I took a bus there, and frankly, we remember the ride being much longer than that (Google says 6 hours though). There is an observation tower just outside of town that you can climb to see one of the drawings, and supposedly they can also be seen from the mountains surrounding the valley (though some of the drawings are on top of those mountains), but the best way to see them all and to get a good sense of their size is from the air. There is a small airport there in Nazca that exists almost solely for sightseeing flights, and is how Holly and I viewed them.
So what are they? Basically they are just these huge drawings in the desert sand. The spider pictured above is approximately 150 feet across long ways, and some of the other ones are more than 4 times that big. The lines themselves are not very deep; only a few inches, but have been perfectly preserved over the years. No one knows exactly how or (maybe more importantly) why they were made, though as you can imagine, there are lots of theories. If we dig right down to it, I think THAT is what capitivates me most about them… no one knows why they are there, but for some reason an ancient civilization spent a whole lot of time making them. Pretty crazy stuff!
–Dan Thompson