Nasca

My final stop in South America, besides the Lima airport, was Nasca (back in Peru). Located in the middle of the desert about seven hours south of Lima, Nasca is home to the Nasca lines: mysterious and mind-bogglingly large-scale geoglyphs etched into the desert by the ancient Nasca culture. They can only truly be appreciated from the air (which is part of what makes them inexplicable, since the Nasca obviously didn't have airplanes), so I signed up for an airplane tour.

While the most famous and recognizable geoglyphs are the animal pictures (monkey, hummingbird, etc.), the whole desert around Nasca is covered with more simple designs of geometric forms and lines:

But of course the real excitement was spotting the more complex forms...

A map the airplane provided showing the geoglyphs we'd see

The whale

The monkey

The hummingbird