Day 7 16th November Mysterious Lines and Ancient Mummy´s - Nasca to Arequipa 566km

Last nights drinking or some dodgy food has caught up with me, the upside being that my Spanish is improving "Donde esta la banos" roughly translated to "where is the bathroom?" I need to find out the word for quick.

We took a flight over the Nasca lines which can only be viewed properly from the air, frpm he ground you wouldn´t know you were standing in the middle of them. The lines are a bit of a mystery, drawn 200BC - 600 AD, some of which are drawings several hundred meters accross. There are plenty of theories one of which is that the ancient Nasca civilation mastered flight with hot air ballons almost 2000 years ago. http://www.delange.org/Nazca/Nazca.htm

This is a map of what you would see looking down from the plane

Just down the road well a 15km dirt track is an ancient Inca cemetry where some excavated mummy´s are on show. Many of the tombs were robbed of the gold, silver and pottery that was buried with the mummy´s but those that survived have been perfectly preserved by the dry climate. The desert plane surrounding the tombs is littered with bone fragments in every direction from the robbed tombs. In terms of the tomb robbing much of this was legal and authorised by the Peru Government during an economic crisis.

One of Peru´s largest exports is minerals with the north of the country rich in Gold, hence the "Gold of the Inca´s" We visited a processing factory run by the singing minner.

We caught the night bus to Arequipa at 10:45 with the bus actually ariving at 1am. The only way I can describe the start of this journey before I fell asleep was a rollercoaster in the dark, without the seat belt I would have fallen out of my chair as the coach raced round the mountian roads. The coach journey was 9 hours but the seats were more comfortable than on most planes I have been on.

Highlights: Ancient Nasca lines