We took a 7-hour bus ride through Ica to Nazca. Sixty years ago, Nazca was a dusty small town in the middle of the desert south of Lima. The locals had long known of some of the ancient piles of stones outside of town on the desert plain, but they didn’t know they were in the middle of one of the world’s great mysteries. That all changed in 1939 when Paul Kosok, a water irrigation scientist from the United States, was flying over the region in a small plane. From the sky, he was the first person to look down and see the unusual lines. At first, Kosok believed that the lines outlined an ancient irrigation system. But then he made another pass of the area and noticed that they were intricately detailed patterns of animals, plants, geometric shapes, and straight lines.
We chartered one of the tourist planes for a 35-minute flight over the plains of Nazca to see one of the greatest mysteries on the planet. 
Here you see a few of the dozens of images on the Nazca plains. They are each hundreds of meters to several kilometers long and most are only visible as designs from high altitude. Click on each photo to see an enlarged version (then click the ¨Back¨ button to return). The first one, known as ¨The Astronaut¨ looks eerily like someone in an astronaut suit - hundreds or thousands or years before we had astronauts. Hmmm... how did these images that can only be seen from high altititudes get created???
The designs are believed to have been created by the Nazca culture between 200 BC and 700 AD. There are hundreds of individual figures, ranging in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, fish, sharks, llamas and lizards. The lines are shallow designs where the reddish pebbles that cover the surrounding landscape have been removed, revealing the whitish earth underneath. The dry, windless, stable climate of the plateau has preserved the lines to this day.
After our flight over the Nazca plain, we boarded a bus for 2.5 hours back to Ica where we chartered a dune buggy to take us into the mammoth sand dunes outside the city. 
The scale of the sand dunes across dozens of miles of horizon is awesome.
After strapping on our boards, we attempted to conquer the dunes. (You may want to click on some of these to enlarge them to see the massive size of the dunes compared to us... then click ¨Back¨ to return). 
Those of us who can snowboard were fairly successful.
Those of us who can´t snowboard took Option B.
We were still cleaning sand out of our clothing and shoes for the next few days, but the experience of sandboarding down 500+ foot dunes with a spectacular view was breathtaking.
After a bus ride back to Lima, we boarded a 10:30 pm flight to Santa Cruz, Bolivia where we would meet up with a bunch of fanatic ducks... Oregon Ducks, that is.
- Steve
