16/09/2019 Nasca Lines, travel to Arequipa, Peru

We got up and were served our hostel breakfast of eggs, bread, and coffee outside. It was cloudy and overcast, which I believe is quite rare for Nasca, so we wandered whether our flight today may be delayed or cancelled. Nevertheless we packed up our room and stored our bags in reception, where we awaited our 1200 pick up. We ate our leftover tuna pasta as an early lunch to give us time to digest, as we had been warned the flights often make passengers motion sick. We got dropped off at the airport where our company we had booked with, Aeronasca, explained that because of the cloud coverage this morning flights were delayed by about three hours. They checked our passports and weighed us before ushering us to another guy who was trying to sell us some tours to other attractions for us to bide our time with. We politely declined then found the café with a view of the planes taking off, which we settled down into. Josh was wearing his Sacha Lodge bag from our trip to the jungle with mum and dad, and got stopped by a German girl who was also wearing her Sacha Lodge bag. We got chatting to her and she said she had spent a year in Ecuador teaching English, and had been taken to Sacha Lodge by her parents. What was funny was that when I logged into the Wi-Fi I had a photo message of Josh and I queuing at the airport from Luis, who had been our tour guide at Sacha Lodge. I think the German girl had papped us wearing the bag, sent it to Luis, who then recognised us and sent it on to me! It is such a small world! In the café I received an email asking me for a review of how our journey had been to Arequipa last night. At which point I got a sinking feeling and realised I had had a dippy moment when booking our onward bus from Nasca to Arequipa, and had booked a 00:15 bus to Arequipa for the wrong day. We had missed our scheduled bus! Woopsie! We planned to go to the bus terminal to sort this out after our flight.

After a couple of hours of waiting in the café our names got called and we got taken through the security scanners, our passports were checked (and stamped to Josh’s joy!), and we paid the 30 Sol Airport tax. We got escorted to our little 8-seater plane (including pilot and co-pilot) and were allowed to take some photos before we jumped in. We had to be allocated seats according to our weight to balance the plane because it is so small.

Josh and I sat next to each other in the middle. Once we had clambered in we put our headphones on so that we could hear the co-pilot over the engines, describing what we were looking at as we flew. We had a smooth take off and before long the co-pilot was guiding our eyes so we could look down onto the desert with a birds eye view of the Nasca lines.

We saw all sorts, a spider, a monkey, an astronaut, and a parrot to name a few. They were absolutely huge, and much more clear and neat than I had been expecting. We swooped to the left and then turned and swooped to the right for each image we went to, in order for everyone in the plane to get a good view. This definitely added to the motion sickness, which, from looking at everyone’s faces as we disembarqued had gotten to all of us! We were in the air for over half an hour and regardless of the severe motion sickness, it was so much fun! We saw the aqueducts that had been the Nazca people’s water system, before having smooth landing.

Once back at the airport we sat on a bench and did some deep breathing looking at the horizon, waiting for our bus transfer back into town. We got our transfer bus to the bus terminal so as to try and buy a bus ticket for this evening to Arequipa, which is when I was meant to have booked the bus for. Eventually, after scope-ing out all our options from the different bus companies, we had one booked for 21:30 this evening. It would be a less luxurious bus but would get us there for our scheduled arrival in Arequipa at least. We stopped in a café and had an early dinner before walking back to our hostel. We grabbed our suitcases, did a quick refresh prior to our nights travel, and got a taxi with all our stuff to the planetarium. Here we stored our luggage and went to a talk about the Nasca lines and how they linked to astronomy. We looked through a huge telescope and saw Saturn and its rings, Jupiter and its four moons, and had a look at the moon too. We left pretty sharpish to get to the bus terminal in time. We checked our luggage in and waited…and waited… and waited… eventually our bus arrived two hours late. We climbed in and nestled up, falling asleep to a podcast.