Yesterday on my last day in Arequipa I only visited the museum of the 'ice princess' mummie Juanita, who was sacrificed on top of a 6000+ mountain 500 years ago. It was as lame as I thought, they make a big fuss about treating this mummie respectfully while elsewhere I've already seen other mummies stuffed into glass display boxes between old pottery and textiles. It was also ridiculous how they did their best to present this common practice of sacrificing human children on mountain tops as not barbaric.

I spent most of the rest of the day wandering around an 'artesanal' market buying souvenirs, and as a result my back pack is now overfull and I got to wear my fleece around my waist all day. My favourite souvenir is an Inka Kola T-shirt (Inka Kola is the most popular drink in Peru) which I plan to wear on my visit to Coca Cola World in Atlanta.

At 9pm I took a night bus out of Arequipa, where I've stayed 8 days (2 of which climbing El Misti and 3 in Colca Canyon though). To make the night bus less painful I'd bought an expensive ticket with the luxury company Cruz del Sur, who let me pick the seat behind the entrance for extra leg space and who assured me a vegetarian meal (the trip was dinner included) was no problem. On the bus, the layout turned out to be different than on their reservation system so my seat was an ordinary one with little leg room, and my dinner turned out to have plenty of meat in it, so I was pretty pissed off and of course I didn't sleep for a minute. Fuck Cruz del Sur.

Nazca is famous for the Nazca lines, huge figures drawn in the sand some 1400 years ago by an extinct culture that probably never got to enjoy their work themselves since you can only really see the figures from the sky. We arrived in Nazca at 5am. I planned to just wait somewhere until 8am to arrange a flight, but a guy came to me and said I could wait in his agency and use internet which was too good an offer to turn down so I booked with him and uploaded the Colca Canyon pictures below while waiting to go to the airport.

I decided to pay 10$ more to fly with a 6-seat mini plane because the guy said I'd get the seat next to the pilot coz I'm tall (hear that Cruz del Sur?!), and it was a fantastic experience. I actually had to move my legs aside when the pilot needed to use the handles in front of me. I was tempted to pull some of them myself to find out what they do :)

Over each figure - we saw about a dozen - the pilot first banked almost 90 degrees to the right to circle around it once and then banked almost 180 degrees to the left to make another circle around it for the passengers on the left. Two times a loud beeper went off to signal that we were almost stalling. It was an absolutely stomach twister and after 5 minutes two of the girls in the plane were already throwing up. My stomach held though and the bad smell didn't ruin my fun.

As for the lines themselves, since they're in the desert you have no sense of scale and the figures look disappointingly small. They are beautiful however, pure Keith Haring avant la lettre. I bought a silver ring with the nicest Nazca figures engraved in it at the beginning of this trip and have been wearing it since, so I know those figures by heart by now and it was fun to finally see them in real. I have good pics of most of them so I'll post a nice collection in my report, along with some of the movies I made.

After the flight I made a short excursion to the Nazca necropolis out in the desert where dozens of mummies are on display in the open, making the Juanita museum in Arequipa look even more futile.

Then I caught a chicken bus to the town of Ica and from there a taxi to the nearby oasis Huacachina where I am now. This place is simply superb; it's a classic palm-tree oasis with a big lake in the middle and it's surrounded by very high sand dunes, from which you can descend on snowboards. That's what I'm gonna do tomorrow, as well as hanging around the pool of my funky hotel. Guess why I immediately decided to stay an extra night here :)