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To make up for it, when we did get going, a pod of dolphins were playing very close to shore. The annoying American man on the bus who insisted on occasionally getting angry and talking at us did eventually go away when we reached the bus station in Nazca. Also we'd booked the bus with food arrangements; the company said they didn't know we were vegetarian. Food therefore consisted of cake and dried crackers. We've had worse.
Buses in Peru are surprisingly like flights
In the two long bus journeys we've had, we had to book/ check in, our bags were weighed, we were put in a little waiting area before boarding the bus, we were scanned with a metal detector, as was our hand luggage, and we were filmed when on the bus, for 'security' reasons. The buses also have screens and show films that you can't hear.
As part of our travel arrangements, booked in Arequipa, we were expecting to be picked up at the bus station. This didn't happen. A very nice lady in tourist information sorted us out, and someone from a flight company came to collect us. This is the flight company we had booked our Nazca flight with. We were then offered two accommodations, and only two accommodations, as the company needed to know where to pick us up from for the flight the following morning. We'd looked up some options but we were not able to go to those options because the flight company needed to know where we were staying. So, gritting our teeth, we went with one, Hostal Dunas Blancas. Which turned out to be very nice. There was a fan, a toilet seat, and a large bed! Happy days. Unfortunately Ken wasn't feeling well, so we decided to stay in and recuperate.
Whilst waiting for the transport to the accommodation, we had gone to the bus company office to pick up our tickets for our next leg of the journey, the following day
The bus company had no record of this booking. We were not pleased with the Arequipa lying scheming bl*ody company we'd used to pre-book this important stuff. We asked three different people to call the company on our behalf; none of the numbers on the booking voucher or the company leaflet worked. The reason we'd pre-booked was to make absolutely sure we would be in Cusco in time for our Inca Trail trip. We fired off an email to the various email addresses of the company and hoped for the best. A google search on the company was not encouraging, with people claiming that this was a fraudulent company.
On Wednesday 8th, we were picked up by the flight company at 7am. Our flight was a 35 minute pleasure flight over the world famous Nazca lines. The airport was a little chaotic and we had to pay a surprise 'departure' tax from the airport of 25 soles (about £5.50) each. We had the usual flight precautions of passing through metal detectors and having our bags searched. We were given a little map of what geoglyphs we could expect to see. It was just us two, the two pilots, and two more passengers. Just two minutes after take off, we could already see the hundreds of lines that make up the geoglyphs. The more we looked, the more we could see. The plane banked from left to right to make sure that we had a good view of the most famous geoglyphs, which included the whale, trapezoids, astronaut, monkey, dog, hummingbird, spider, condor, parrot, tree and hands
The only geoglyph we missed was alcatraz. We applied a filter to some of the pictures to bring out the lines of the geoglyphs. (The ground isn't really purple.) On returning to the airport, we even got a stamp in our passports, and a certificate!
As you can see from the pictures, there is a road running through the site. The tree is right next to the road. It's little wonder that Greenpeace were able to successfully trespass to the hummingbird! The place is covered in lines and other less clear and less famous symbols. It was definitely worth the trip and one of our highlights so far.
We returned to the hostel for breakfast, checked out, and made our way to the bus station. The bus company did eventually find our booking, which was under misspelt names and incorrect passport numbers. We hadn't been had by the Arequipa company after all, though they had done a shoddy job of our bookings and done us out of a couple of promised taxi rides. Lesson learned.