I arrived in Nazca on Monday night and on Tuesday morning I had a flight booked over the Nazca Lines from the small Maria Reich airport nearby.
The Nazca Lines are a series of symbols and geometric shapes etched into 500sq kms of the desert pampa by the Nazca people between 200 and 700 AD. They range from complicated animal shapes like condors, spiders, hands, trees, hummingbirds and monkeys, etc to simple lines and triangles. They were created by brushing away the top layer of rocks on the desert plain to reveal the lighter sand beneath. There is a viewing tower on the ground next to a couple of the symbols but you can't really see much unless you take a flight as the shapes are so huge, some over 200m across and there are so many of them spread over a wide area.
The shapes were each made in a continuous line and no one has ever been able to conclusively say what their purpose was. Some researchers think they were a kind of agricultural calender, others think they were sacred ceremonial pathways and if I remember rightly from reading Erik Von Daniken when I was a teenager, he thought they were extraterrestrial runways.
The plane was a little 5-seater cessna and I'd been advised by my hostel owner not to have breakfast that morning as the planes have to fly a very zig-zag route so you can see all the lines from both the left and the right of the plane. The flight lasted about 25 minutes. In the event, I didn't find it too bad, although I thought the woman sitting next to me was going to be ill at one point, thankfully she wasn't.
There's no way I could have done justice to the lines with photos so I mostly didn't bother. Plus, I actually wanted to see them properly rather than through the lens of my camera. I took a couple of videos though & I've posted them up. I've had to content myself with postcards instead of photos.

In the afternoon I visited a Nazca cemetary at Chauchilla. The tombs were all opened by grave robbers in the 1920's to 40's and obviously their main priority was not preserving archaeological relics. The Peruvain governement still doesn't seem to be able to do much about preserving the site as there are fragments of ancient bone, material & pottery scattered around all over the area and across the pathways. The grave robbers took the valuable grave goods such as intact pottery, gold, etc and left the bodies. As this part of Peru receives very little rain the bodies have been effectively mummified, many still have skin on their faces, even though they are open to the elements in open tombs. The bodies were buried sitting upright in a foetal position either in their clothes or in a burial bag and that is how they still look today. It's a bit eerie as you half expect them to jump to their feet and start waving their arms around, although their arms would proabably fall off fairly swiftly if they tried. Their clothes and hair are often still intact and some of them have really long dreadlocks which makes them look even more like horror film special effects.

After being thoroughly spooked out by the Nazca mummies I went to see some Inca ruins at Paradones and then on to a Nazca aquaduct which was subsequently used by the Incas and is still providing water to the city of Nazca today. In addition to the aquaduct there are a series of 20 spiral shaped wells made of stone. Like the Nazca lines, no one is quite sure what the purpose of these were but it's suspected that they were probably ceremonial.

On Wednesday I visited an archaological museum and hung around Nazca town. In the evening I caught a 14 hour overnight bus to Cusco. The bus itself was good but the roads were so twisty-turney that I hardly slept and so managed to jet lag myself without having left the ground or gone through a time zone.
More from Cusco after I've returned from the Inca Trail.