NASCA - AREQUIPA

Day 81 29.09.15

After waking up early, and breakfast, we headed out to go and visit the cemetery of Chauchilla.

The cemetery is situated in the middle of the desert. The cemetery is special as it displays several mummies that were mummified and buried around the Nasca area over a large area of desert land.

The mummies were buried in a fetal position, as they believed in the after life and being reborn again there. Hence, they were buried in the most intricate textiles, wrapped in cotton and buried with pottery containing what they like to eat most, what related them with their prior life, such as corn, and agriculture, or seashells and fishers.

As infant mortality was quite high, a family would have many dead babies and infants that were mummified and buried in the family chambers. As they were considered very pure and innocent, they were buried in front of their family, possibly to protect them from evil when it came to crossing to the after life. Here is a mummy of a toddler.

Here is a photo of a family grave with the infants buried in front of the main grave.

We walked along to the next grave, where you can see two mummies, one adult (taking into account that the people only lived to become 30 – 35 years during this time), and a little child, both altered to sit in this fetal position and wrapped in cotton and textiles.

The next grave shows a chamber with two important members of the community. You can tell by their long long hair. (Yes, these long ropes around their bodies are enormous rastas). These two were actually shamans. There was no distinction whether you were rich or poor, the Nazcans had high respect for the dead and so everyone was mummified, no matter where they stood on the social ladder. The only difference was what these people were buried with. People of higher standing would be wearing their gold or silver jewellery and even finer textiles as an immediate symbol of wealth.

A family grave held all family members, meaning that if one generation died, it was sealed off behind a wall erected inside the grave. If the next generation died, they would be buried in the next compartment and sealed off again. Here you can see these walls.

Here another mummy.

We walked on to a small museum featuring other mummies. Especially interesting was the fact that they also mummified a parrot, not endemic to the region, which must have been brought from the Amazon. It is believed that the parrot was mummified and buried as a sacrifice in the hope of receiving more rain, just like in the Amazonian jungle, right here in this arid desert.

From the Chauchilla cemetery we headed to the local airport. From here we were going to take a small Cessna and fly over the Nasca lines. We waited a while to board with the airline, as this special airline only has two aircrafts.

Once we finally got to the airfield, we received a quick security briefing and which images we would be seeing in which order.

Here is the list, this might also help understand what I saw on the lines, since some of this picture being taken from such height aren’t the most focused ones, and cannot capture the white colour of the lines over the rest of the earth.

We taxied to the runway and off we were. I think I was the smallest plane I have ever flown with, even the plane for my skydive was larger than this little one.

Hence, there were several drops and rises just like a rollercoaster, making it even harder to keep a camera steady.

As soon as we had reached the necessary altitude we could already see various lines that formed geometric shapes. Here you can see little triangles leading to some sort of altar point, which can be identified as the blackish centre of the photo.

Ok, the next photo is a bit tricky. It is the image of a whale. Now have a look again at the overview photo and spot the whale (number 1). As you can see its sort of arched. Now look at this photo; if you look at the horizontal line that is quite wide, going right from where it crosses the vertical line, about half way through is the image. Here the whales mouth is looking down under the line, and its tale is above the line.

From the air however, you could see the image quite clearly.

Now, thankfully I got some pictures of my fellow lovely roommate Mo, who with her Canon was able to shoot better photos. However, they are the result of being zoomed in so that you can easily see the images. Here the zoomed in version of the whale.

Moving on to the next image we passed large plains of land where you could see how water had once passed through this valley leaving behind all these little white lines. Still you can see several Nasca lines all over, just mainly larger and wider ones, which seem more like walkways than actual figurines.

We passed the image of the parrot.

We passed the image of the spider (one of my favourite ones).

We passed the image of the condor.

We passed the image of the monkey, very impressive this one due to the circular lines of the tail!

We passed the image of the astronaut or owlman. There are different theories about this one. Either it’s a sign that the whole alien theory is true and that the Nasca lines are just a huge airport for aliens, or it’s the sign of a plain animal owl, (with a human like body), or it is a symbol of a shaman, as they used to take drugs to hallucinate (big drugged up eyes) and be able to predict the future, good hunting grounds or for their rituals.

We passed the hummingbird.

We passed the images of the tree and the hand again that we had seen from the tower yesterday, this time from the birds-eye perspective though.

Here is Mo’s image, even clearer.

It was quite hard spotting the images, taking photos and videos all along the airplane was going up and down. So there are hardly and photos of mine for the way back, since I decided my stomach would rather just enjoy the view and not fiddle about with equipment.

We landed and headed back to the hotel and had some free time until we would leave on our long bus journey.

I decided to pop into a nearby cevichería to have a nice lunch before we left. It was really good!

So up on the large bus we got and departed on our 10 hours trip to Arequipa. The bus itself was quite comfortable and it had reclineable seats, a great foot / leg rest, and a total of 3 films. All in all a very luxurious bus ride, I think the best one so far, taking into account that we were on it for 10 hours.

We also got served lunch about an hour and a half after we had left. I of course was no longer hungry, but tried to eat as much as possible, knowing that there wouldn’t be anymore for the evening. The views from the bus were great; we had a lovely sunset.

The landscape varied too; from complete desert to the more rocky bits, to actual mountains, back to the shoreline and the sea.

There was only one longer stop during the ride, which was to change one of our tires. Oh yes, a fully packed bus, with people and luggage (oh yeah, did I mention that there were two levels?), and the tire blows and they go to change it. Crazy.

When we eventually got to Arequipa it was a lot colder and already late at night (1am) and so we quickly drove to the hotel and fell into our beds.