Lima was a somewhat charmless city, widely regarded as quite dangerous, we were advised to stay in the afluent Miraflores district, and visit the historic centre during daylight hours. Not that there was much to see there, although we did hunt down the somehwat infamous statue of a lady with a llama on her head. The story goes that back in the day the Spanish colonials ordered a statue of some saint-ess with a crown of flames on her head and didn't bother to resolve the dual meanings of llama in Spanish.

So anyways we got out pretty sharply and headed to Nazca, which thousands of years ago was grafitied (which looks a lot like gratified) all over by some pre-colonial hooligans. The lines are actually made by careful removal of pebbles in an area that gets almost no rain and so the pattern of light earth under dark pebbles has been maintained for around 1500 years. The way to see the lines is to take to the air, which we did in a wee six seat Cesna Centurion (both Jacq and I's first time in a light aircraft). The trip is only half an hour as you start circling the various animal and geometric shapes almost as soon as you've finished climbing. The real puzzle of the site is what the fairly primitive folk were up to making drawings that you can really only decipher from the air. One of the early researchers apparently tried to build a hot-air balloon from pre-colonial materials to avoid the whole thing attracting too many UFO nuts.

Another trip on a double decker inter-city bus (complete with ¿land hostess?) got us to Arequipa where I promptly succumbed to altitude sickness (at the lowest limit of the altitude range where you might possibly get it).