Ancient Desert Civilizations: Nasca, Peru

About 400km South of Lima, just outside the town of Nasca, in the middle of the massive coastal desert are some of the most bizzare and mysterious evidences of ancient cultures in the world. All over the desert floor, massive etchings - monkey, humming birds, dogs, people, condors, lizards and more have been carved into the sand and rock. No ones exactly sure when they got there - sometime in the 4th-6th century most people recon. But what´s even more odd is how or why they got there. These designs are huge, so big that you can´t see them from the ground. Why would someone take all that time to make desert art that they can´t even see? Some say it was an offering to the gods, some say it was to encourage rain, and some say that it wasn´t humans at all but maybe aliens. Who knows really? I have to confess that from ground level, we didn´t really get a good view of the lines which was too bad. From reports from other travellers, the $50 flight to see them from above didn´t seem worth it, so we were content viewing the lines from the ground and imagining (with the help of photos) what they might look like from above. But either way, there was still lots to check out on the ground.
Outside of Nasca, also in the middle of the desert (really that´s all there is) is another odd reminder of days gone by. Scattered throughout the ground are countless graves, buried as much as 2300 years ago, and well preserved by the desert heat. Though most of the graves, known as the Chauchilla Cemetery, have been robbed over time by looters looking for gold and jewlery buried with the dead, it is still an eery place, with open graves of half mummified bodies, pottery, and scattered clothes all over the place. In recent years archealogists have been busy preserving the graves, restoring them to their origanal positions, and covering over many that have been left open by the looters. Now you have the opportunity so witness ancient burial practises as they may have been done (if that´s you sort of thing). However, even with 12 nicely preserved graves, there are still shards of bones and clothes all over the grounds which makes for a really bizzare sight.
So that was pretty much the final stop on our South American tour. Yesterday we headed a 7 hour, though relatively painless bus up to Lima, and here we are waiting for our flight that is only 14 hours away...