Rose

We will be going up to Bolivia in mid August so we may well bump into you. Have fun!

It’s been wonderful reading your adventures so far – Cusco sounds like an amazing place – glad to hear your Spanish lessons are coming on – but you are managing to still eat a Sunday roast – quite an achievement!

Just though Allie would like to hear the great news that we have just received – our bid to Barings was a success!!! Yay!!!! Thanks for all of your work on it. I guess it’s all feeling like a distant memory now – at least I hope so.

Thinking of you,

Hayles x

There are a lot of figures (a hundred?) – various birds, the space man, the monkey – some drawn with perfect geometry, others seemingly more loose. They vary in size from tens of meters to 900meters for the largest. There’s also hundreds of geometric patterns made up of straight lines, triangles, curves, trapezoids. They’re created by removing the top level of earth that’s been exposed to the sun for aeons thus revealing the darker sands beneath. They’re preserved so well because the area receives so little rain – 20 minutes or so per year!

The recognisable creatures draw much of the attention but in some ways the sheer number of lines, shapes and patterns is even more interesting. In 2006 Japanese geologists investigating the Nazca plataeu found another 100 patterns and shapes including some kind of horned creature. No one knows why they were created. They can only be seen in full from hundreds of feet in the air and so remained all but invisible until commercial flights between Lima and Arequipa became frequent in the 1930s and someone spotted them. There’s no vantage point in the desolate area to view them from the ground.

Most of the theories put forth to explain their creation have been discounted. From the more absurd alien spacecraft runways to a gigantic astronomical calendar of some sort. I read that some 20% could be linked to some kind of astronomical alignment – or about what you might expect if you drew a bunch of random lines in the desert. That theory still fails to explain the multiple animal figures.

To me it seems the most likely explanation is some kind of religious or cult like motivation, perhaps a ritual to bring rain to the desolate lands around the plataeu. Since the lines and figures can only be viewed from the air it seems possible that they are intended as some kind of tribute to the gods of the Nazcans or some prior culture. Much more has been done in the name of imagined deities.

Or maybe they were created with the help of the same alien visitors that helped create the pyramids. We will probably never know.

Today they seem to serve as a pretty lucrative tourist attraction for the locals in an area capable of producing very little food and receiving almost no water.