Flying over the Nazca Lines

Above:  Whale at Nazca; upper central part of the photo. 

Today we were booked to do a flight over the Nazca lines. Kim woke up feeling very lethargic. He also had stomach pains through the night too and soon enough he was having the runs. As we share all our meals, we expected that it wouldn’t be serious as I wasn’t affected

We got picked up for the airport at 0800 and got there shortly after. We checked-in and had ourselves weighed with Aero Nasca and were told to wait for an hour. The hour passed and nothing happened. A little later we saw the Aero Nasca clerk talking to various other airlines in turn.

We were finally led through to departures and then the aircraft after 1000. It turned out we were on a different airline Aero Palcasu on a 1972 aircraft. It appeared to be the oldest plane at the airport.

We took off for our 35 min flight making our way through the various symbols. One pilot flew the plane while the other narrated. We banked over nearly all the symbols once on the portside and another time on the starboard to ensure everyone had a decent view. They weren’t easy to spot without a pilot pointing them out.

Kim had had to make more toilet visits at the airport and felt rather sick during the tight turns over the Nazca lines. He reached for the sickbag but we managed to land before he emptied his guts.

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I had booked the flight through one of very few informative websites www.nazcaflights.com (which was an agent rather than an airline). We had paid a little more than what others had paid and had to endure a longer wait. And we felt we had been shunted to a poorer quality airline.

I put my feedback in an email a few days later to the operator of the website and he was rather unhappy to hear that his contracted airline and pushed us to another which he wouldn’t have approved of. He offered a partial but substantial refund to each of us.

I had breakfast back at the hotel while Kim tried to sleep off his illness. After a couple of hours, he was much better. As he hadn’t been to the toilet again, we felt confident enough to take the long bus ride from Nazca to Arequipa. We had paid for the night here in Nazca but we were ready to move, so it didn’t matter. In his tender state we opted to upgrade from 140 degree business class to 160 degree first class.

The bus left promptly at 1515. We were located in a small compartment between the wheelbase, located under the main deck above. I felt a bit sick about halfway through the journey with the many turns on the road. After watching a couple of movies sans soundtrack, I dozed from 2030 to 2130, then must have slept quite well from then till nearly arrival at 0040 (instead of the 2355 ETA). It was a long drive of over 9h on windy roads, in darkness with no lighting for a large part of it.

We took a taxi to the Los Andes Bed & Breakfast (more like a hostel) where we had a private room for 3 nights. We were both in bed before 0200.