Nasca, Peru, South America

I had my flight over the Nazca lines this morning, and it was pretty awesome! It started with an early wake up call, and I was picked up by the tour company at 7am. There were already a bunch of french people in the van, and we went straight to the airport from my hostel. It was only about a ten minute drive to the airport, and there were quite a few people there waiting to go on a flight. I had to register with my passport, get weighed, and then pay 25 soles ($8) for the airport tax. We then all sat in a waiting area and saw a documentary program in english about the lines. It was really interesting because I didn’t know too much about how they made them and why, but it was all discussed on the video before I got to see them.

I got called to go out with four french people (different from those on my van) and the five of us were joined by the two pilots. Apparently a few planes went down in the span of one year about three years ago, so now they are required to bring two pilots up. I chose not to tell my mom this fact before going on the flight. We all got into the little eight seater Cessna and took off. I was on the left side and had a french guy sitting to my right.

The pilots know what they’re doing, so they tell us what figure we’re going to see next, they pass it so you can see it out the right window, and then loop around and pass so I could see it out the left window. Unfortunately the guy next to me didn’t understand this concept, so every time we passed the lines out the left window, he kept leaning over me to try and get more pictures on my side. This meant he kept getting in front of my window so I couldn’t see. That didn’t last long after I told him he had to stay on his side. Why would someone think that’s an acceptable thing to do??

The lines were not as prominent as I expected them to be, and it made me really happy that I took the small plane that flies at a lower altitude. If we’d gone any higher it would have been really tough to see the lines at all. We saw about a dozen of the figures from the air, and the flight lasted about 35 minutes. It was a really good experience, besides the guy sitting next to me, but I got over that.

I got back to the hotel around 9:30am and had a nice breakfast up on the roof terrace. There’s not much to see up there, as there’s not a heck of a lot happening in Nazca city, but it was still nice. I looked for some things to do here in the city for today, but there’s really nothing to do. Luckily it is Sunday so I could watch the NFL games! A few games were shown on TV here, in spanish, so I watched those, and then got to watch the whole Pats game on the slingplayer, so I could hear the american commentary too. It was a great game to see. We got embarrassed last Monday night in Kansas City, so we came back and crushed the Bengals at home. Way to get a statement win guys!