Nazca

Today was 10 years since we started dating and we had an amazing day celebrating!

We started the day with a quick trip to Nazca airport where we boarded a small Cessna plane to view the Nazca lines. The Nazca lines are 350km2 of geoglyphs which are a series of images, lines and geometric images created by removing stone from the ground and exposing a layer of white clay below. They were created around 2000 years ago! Although we don't know exactly how and why they were made, there are many different theories. The 5th most popular theory is that the lines were made by aliens! The view from the plane was incredible and we got to see so many of the different images, including the whale, monkey, spiral, flower, hummingbird, astronaut, hands and trees. It definitely took a strong head and stomach as the pilot was throwing the plane around a lot from side to side to make sure we got an awesome view!

After finding our earth legs again, we made our way to our lunch spot which was a buffet lunch cooked by traditional methods. It was cooked in pachamama (Mother Earth - in the ground) and consisted of beef, chicken, pork, baked cheese, potatoes and various other things! It takes at least 4 hours of preparation (2 hours to create the 'oven' in the ground and 2 hours to cook underground). This is a traditional meal made for special occasions such as birthdays.

We then went to an archaeological site to see the traditional mummification process - it was effectively viewing a 1000 year old open grave, definitely not what any of us were expecting! There is not a much of information available about these mummies so we walked around with André and learnt about the theories and information.

We then went to the top of a viewing tower for a different perspective of a few of the Nazca lines and watched the sunset over the desert. It was amazing!

We went back to the hotel to check out and have a quick light dinner of waffles and went to a pool bar to watch a soccer match. The people in the bar were cheering and getting so animated!

We then had a wait for our night bus to Arequipa. We knew it was delayed so we played some crossword games with our group (which have become one of our favourite bus activities) and sat in the park until our bus which finally arrived at 1am (it was supposed to arrive at 10:30pm!)Okumaya devam et