Travellers Rest

Our reward today for the sixteen hours of travelling we did yesterday was the luxury of having an entire day free!

No sightseeing!

No travelling!

And more importantly, no stairs, steps, climbing or plant pots to smash!

Starting with an amazing hot buffet breakfast, we had a quick wander around Nazca town centre, taking in the (by now) ubiquitous Plaza De Armas

and generally just looking at souvenirs in many of the small shops.

Our one task for today was to book a flight over the Nazca Lines for tomorrow. We’d done a bit of research before, and heard good reviews about a company called Mystery Peru. As their office was around the corner from our hotel, next to another small square,

we popped in to buy some tickets.

In all the time in South America, we’ve never really struggled to get anything. Booking the tickets for the Nazca Lines flight bucked this trend though. We didn’t speak enough Spanish, the girl on the counter didn’t speak any English, and so we were left with the difficult task of trying to mime the exact time of flight we wanted! Even when she produced an English-Spanish dictionary, it didn’t really help!

Luckily, we had the presence of mind to get a pen and paper, and (one or two periods of incomprehension later), we managed to have a receipt in our hands for tomorrows trip! Whether this actually means that our understanding of what we bought and the girl’s understanding of what she sold are the same remains to be seen! But, it wasn’t a bad experience, and was actually quite funny in places as we just couldn’t understand a word the other was saying!

The heat in Nazca was now bearing down with full effect. The town is in the middle of the desert and, while it was cool in the morning, the heat and sunshine seemed to increase exponentially after mid day.

So, having done our one bit of “work” today, we popped onto a side street to look at some DVD sellers,

went back to the room to find out that the DVD we bought was not only completely in Spanish but had been filmed on a phone in a cinema – (it was only 2 Nuevo Soles though and was worth it for the laugh we had on realising how bad it was!), and then we just crashed in the hotel for the rest of the day.

We even had our evening meal in the hotel restaurant, such was our lack of interest in moving more than a few feet away from our room! And it was not only equivalent in cost to the restaurants in the town, but was one of the best meals we have had in all the trip!