Once it dawned on us, early in the thinking about this trip, that we would be close to the Nazca lines, there was never any doubt that we would see it in person. Whose imagination and sense of wonderment haven’t been set into wild motion by these seemingly impossible geoglyphs, tooled into the vast emptiness of these desert reaches? Who among you hasn’t shivered a little, leafing through Time Life Books’ handsome collection: Mysteries of the Unknown, Volume 1 – Mystic Places?
Who made these stylized geometric and animal forms? And for what purposes? Astronomical purposes, perhaps? Alien runways? What else could be the purpose of something that can only be seen from the air, and can only have been built with an aerial vantage point to guide them?
Spoiler alert: They’re not all that big. In fact, the first scientist to study and push to protect them, one Marie Reich, did much of her observation from a steel tower… And for less than a dollar, you can climb the tower for a peek at a few nearby figures — it’s right off the pan-american highway, which, heartbreakingly, makes progress shine by splitting one of the figures in half.
Still, it’s the Nazca lines, and they are wonderful to experience. We took in the lines in three ways: a taxi ride out to a natural mirador, where we saw many of the radiating simple “lines”, a stop at the ford mentioned tower to view 2 figures, the tree and the hands, up close and personal, and finally. a 30 minute, gut churning flight in a single engine plane that visits the major animal figures across the huge nazca desert.
I like flying, and I’m not that prone to motion sickness… Can’t say that for one of our flight mates, who, at the provocation of the many banking turns designed to give you long views around individual figures, spent much of his time vomiting into his bandana (photo included), his shirt, and a plastic bag.
This is really the only way to see the majority of the glyphs. The distances are simply too great, and the ground view fails to give you the same sense of wonder. At the same time, it’s fast, it’s distant, and we really thought it was important to balance the experience with the ground and tower based views. Besides, you end up with the camera in your face for much of the flight, and it all just happens too fast.
Note: Often the figures are quite faint against the backdrop, we have done our best to frame them up, but you have to look carefully.
As to what the figures are for and how they are made? Well, turns out you can lay them out with conventional ( or primitive?) surveying techniques. Though theories are yet divided, but the compelling one seems to be (if I have this right) that the area once had some major water passing through in the form of rivers. Well, the rivers started drying up bringing hardship to the Nazca people. It’s believed that they were trying to entice their deities to throw ’em a bone in that regard. I think the more striking evidence of that (besides the evidence of the drought) is that many of the animals depicted are not native to the area… They’re cloud forest animals, monkeys, lizards, parrots, from places where water is abundant. Maybe they were saying “hey! Down here! Look, we’re a cloud forest, how about a little water!?”
Who knows? One thing’s for sure: they’re rad, beautiful, and still so compelling. Given that they’re basically just made by displacing the red upper rocks, revealing the whiter stuff underneath, they’ve held up so extremely well. They’re old! The Nazca people laid this stuff out between 400 B.C. and 200 A.D. By contrast, Machu Picchu was thought to have been built in the 1500’s. They might as well have had cable tv.