South America

We camped briefly on the beach at Puerto Inca which was the original Inca port. There is still an Inca trail which starts here and ends up at Cusco, 100 days walk away. There isn't much left of the port except a few ruined storage houses on the hills, which we walked up before heading to the town of Nazca to see the famous Nazca Lines.

On the way to Nazca we stopped off at an ancient Nazca cemetery site which had been looted by grave robbers hundreds of years ago. The Nazca people lived from about 200 BC to 700 AD, when the area was a lot lusher than the desert it is now. They were very religious and practiced mummification of their dead tribesmen. When the tombs were looted, the robbers pulled the mummies out of their graves and left them lying around in the open, taking the gold valuables that were buried with their owners. These mummies were eventually found and some of the tombs restored by archeologists. Out on the surface, the mummies were unfortunately damaged by the elements, making them half mummy, half skeleton. There is still some interesting facts which can be found from these remains, like the skull of a priest which has been forcefully deformed by strapping blocks of wood his head when he was a child. The priest must have looked strange with a long, flat forehead. Some of the mummies had hair over 2 metres in length which was still dark and dreadlocked, showing that they were only young when they died. The mummies had quite a comical appearance, like skeletons with clothes on. There were even mummmified babies in the tombs; one still had skin and toenails poking from under its clothing.

The most famous legacy the Nazca people left were huge pictures in the sand around the town and on mountains, that can only be seen by air. The campsite at Nazca was right opposite the airport, so as soon as we set up camp we arranged ourselves into groups of 5 to go up in the small propeller planes. No one knows how or why the Nazcas made these pictures, but it is thought that the land was drying up, and these were efforts made by the priests to appease the Gods. The flights cost about £40 and lasted for 25mins. We saw 14 pictures including a dog, snake, hummingbird, parrot and (my favourite) a monkey.