Wow! So we went and did the flight over the Nasca lines this morning, and they were incredibly cool. We watched a video afterwards, and it is so mind boggling and very impressive, if only for the fact that no one knows much of anything about them . The hands and the monkey were my personal favorite!
After the lines, we then went on a small tour of this cemetary outside of town that supposedly houses the bones of pre-Incan cultures. It was crazy. They only discovered it 20 years ago, but by then, all the grave robbers had already gotten to the sites, so there are bones and people remnants everywhere. They have excavated a few burial mounds and put up little shelters to guard those from the sun They take the skulls and bones and hair and skin and other objects that they found, and they set it up like a little exhibit in these covered tombs. The sun is so hot here that everything is incredibly preserved, and in some instances, entire baby skeletons are preserved and just chilling in these tombs. And of course, the Peruvian government is too corrupt and underfunded–and just too poor–to do much of anything, so stuff is just laying everywhere. Pretty crazy. It was so strange to look around and just see bones scattered all over the place. We were walking down the trail, and our guide leaned over and picked up a chunk of hair that was apparently from a skeleton–with pieces of scalp still attached. They just don´t have the money to do anything else with the site, so in a way, it was incredibly sad.
