Nasca No NO.

Trip Start Sep 05, 2006

Trip End Sep 04, 2007

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Flag of Peru Nasca, Peru
Friday, August 3, 2007

After arriving in Nasca after dark, something that I generally tend to avoid as a woman traveler, I was pleased to see that a representative from my hostel was at the bus station waiting for me. He got us a cab and let the taxi driver hit on me on the way back to the hostel. He checked me in and sold me a tour for the following day to fly over the Nasca Lines. He irritated me immensely because he was a liar and he kept trying to cheat me out of extra money by playing tricks on his calculator. As tired as I was I wasn´t about to let this jerk cheat me out of more money (I already knew I was being overcharged for the room) so we continued to argue and I did the calculations in the calculator myself. I certainly won´t miss this aspect of Peru. There are always sneaky people trying to weasel extra money out of unsuspecting gringos... grrr.

Anyway, all worked out fine and I went to bed, exhausted after one last night of dancing in Lima with some hostel friends

alien

.

In the morning it was cloudy so we postponed our 9 am flight to 11:30. I was pleased as I had nothing else to do that day and didn´t have to check out of my hostel until 12:00. We got to the airport right on time and then waited for upwards of 2 and 1/2 hours for a pilot. We did, however, get to watch every single one of the documentaries in English and Spanish concerning the Nasca Lines and Maria Reiche. People came and went, had their turns and came back, but we still sat.

I´ve learned not to get upset by this type of thing, it happens so often in South America that I just am accustomed to the wait and the constant change of details, as nothing is EVER at what time they say it´s going to be. Of course my gringa roots run deep so I still show up relatively on time for everything just in case a miracle happens.

So finally around 2:45 we got up in our own rickety little Cessna and went for a ride. I think I was more excited to be in that little plane than I was to see the lines. Especially because they didn´t look as big as they do on the Discovery Channel....

Of course the inevitable happened and I started to feel a bit plane sick. He would turn the plane deep to the right and deep to the left to offer a better view (all while screaming into the headphones ¨Mono! Lado Derecho! Monkey! Left Side!¨) I guess he was trying to do a good job of being the in-flight entertainment. By this time my stomach turned to the left and to the right and I was just counting the minutes until the flight was over

desierto

. It´s a bit ironic really that someone who likes to travel as much as I do should have problems with motion sickness. The same kind of funny that places an ¨s¨ in the word ´lisp´.

We made it back without incident (meaning that I didn´t puke!) and the other folks on the tour teased me a bit because my face had lost all color. I was just happy to be on the ground.

I decided I needed to sit down in the sun with a nice cold bottle of bubbly water to recover from my plane-sickness. I sat on a quiet little bench in a park and watched the little kids play around the fountain. And that´s when my quiet little sunny afternoon was interrupted by what appeared to be disguised as a nice grandfatherly old man.

He said hello and sat down on the other side of the bench. He began grandfatherly conversation. Then he began to talk about love and life which was all leading up to his final question- A proposition to spend the night with him for $200!!

I´m still unclear what about me gave him the idea that I would be interested in prostituting myself - I was wearing my hiking boots and jeans for goodness sakes, not to mention it was like 3:30 in the afternoon!

I politely declined the old dirtbag, while condemning his un-gentlemanlylike conduct and excused myself from the bench. I´m sure that as he was drooling while I walked away he wasn´t the least bit concerned that I thought that he was a dirty old pig.

Needless to say, I was all to happy to leave Nasca that night for a fresh start in a different city.