Marian Johns' Journal of the Desert
Explorers trip to Peru in 2002
Images by John Page unless otherwise noted
Day 5,
September 8, Sunday
Nazca to Camaná See Map
Sept.8,
Sunday – Left the hotel about 7:00 a.m. for an 8:00 flight 
over the
Nazca Lines. We flew over at least 12 figures – a hummingbird, monkey,
dog, whale, hands, spider, “astronaut”, condor, vulture, tree, parrot,
heron, and lots and lots of gigantic, elongated trapezoids.
Erich von Daniken has suggested they are extra-terrestrial landing
strips made by aliens from outer space - a controversial theory that is
not accepted by serious scientists.
See the "Flight Guide." This is a large (393 Kb) PDF file.
Again, we pre-paid for this trip through Victor back in Lima - $50 US. We probably could have paid less if we had arranged it on our own, but it was worth the extra cost because it gave us (me, at least) peace of mind to know we had reservations. At the airport, I bought a small silver charm with the monkey design ($13) and a small, double-spout pot decorated with a Nazca-style design ($20) – both were way overpriced in my opinion, but that was the only place around to buy things.
The airplane made Charlayne nauseous. Riding in the truck also bothers her, so Dr. John gave her a medication-dispensing patch to put behind her ear, and that seems to take care of the motion sickness.
John took care of Charlayne’s problem, but now has one of his own. While backing one of the trucks out of the parking area behind the hotel, he hit the roof support post next to the truck, and put a fairly big dent on the right-hand side.
We didn’t have breakfast
until about 10:30 - after the plane flight. So, we skipped lunch and drove
south along a desolate stretch until we came to the Yauca River Valley
with its many olives trees. When we stopped there in the village of Chala
to buy some olives, 
Mary and John miscommunicated their
intentions and locked the keys in one of the trucks. It took the next
hour, plus the
help of some locals to get a coat hanger grip on the lock latch to open
it.
As we drove on south, the highway became quite twisty and was perched high above the seashore – I’m guessing maybe 500 ft., with sheer, hair-raising drop-offs. Instead of building oodles of bridges across innumerable arroyos, the road engineers merely turned the highway inland up each dry canyon and then back down, then up the next canyon and back down. This made for very slow going, but eventually we reached Camaná where a large river, the Majes, dumps into the ocean.
Our hotel, the Primer, was the least inviting of all so far, but they had parking for the trucks in the basement level. We walked to a nearby local-style restaurant for dinner - simple food and no ambience – definitely not a tourist hangout. I had chicken noodle soup, a fried, whole, but small fish and rice. Later, we walked down a pedestrian mall to an ATM.
