arriving in Nazca. Nazca is a little town in the southern Peruvian desert and is home to the puzzling Nazca Lines. Nobody knows exactly why the lines were made by the ancient Nazca people 200 AD. The area only has 40mm of rain a year and the soil has a high gypsum content so the lines are still clearly visible from the sky. 
We did a flight over the lines, which is a must if you ever visit Nazca. They take you up in these little planes and then test out your resistance to motion sickness by flying the plane with the wings pointing the ground so you can get a good view of the lines if you don’t blackout. The flight was good but Anna was very pleased to make it onto the ground looking a little worse for wear. It also didn’t help that the American guy on our flight told us about a plane going down the week before we flew!!
From Nazca we headed down to the city of Arequipa. Arequipa is a great place to visit, it has amazing history and is set beneath a couple of big active volcano’s which makes for a rather dramatic backdrop. We saw a 400 year old mummy that had been found at the top of one of the Volcanoes when it erupted and blew her out of her icy tomb. The mummy, Juanita as she is called is really well preserved and was clad in some very impressive Incan clothing. She was sacrificed when she was a 14 year old girl by a blow to the head!!!
Arequipa is also home to the Santa Catalina Monastery which housed nuns in isolation from the outside world for 350 years till they were forced to open it to the public in 1970. This place is amazing, going in there is like going back 400 years. The architecture is very impressive and the walls are decorated with murals and 100’s of rather spooky religious paintings and statues. The Monastery is a must see if you are ever in this part of the world. It still houses nuns but they are allowed to go outside the Monastery these days.
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