Gramma Barbie Goes Global

Can you see the monkey with it’s curled tail? It is thought that visitors came from the jungles to ask favors of the powerful shamans and they brought gifts like the monkey and the parrot. The shamans raised these exotic animals and the they would be sacrificed and mummified and buried with their shaman upon his death.

Can you spot the whale? It is thought that the men went to the ocean to fish and saw a big fish. They came back and asked the shamans to draw the whale to ask the gods to protect them while they fished.

This guy was standing outside our plane with a fire extinguisher as we were waiting to take off over the lines…what was he expecting???

The light colored mountain in this photograph is not actually a mountain at all. It is a sand dune and it Towersover the city of Nazca. It takes two hours to get to the top and that is a good spot for sand boarding which is like snowboarding, but warmer.

The Nazca Lines were unknown in the 1930’s when the highway that stretches from Canada down though the Americas was built. It actually cuts through the edge of the area where the lines are. The lines only became known after the first commercial flights started going over them and the pilots started talking about them. Maria Reiche’s took an interest and she walked the lines and mapped them.

It is believed that they were drawn there by shamans who were sending messages to the gods up in the sky and in the mountains. The Inca actually believed that the gods lived in the mountains and many Peruvians still revere the mountains to this day. Anyway, the lines were drawn so they could only be seen from the sky and, since man could not yet fly, only the gods could see them.

Our guide told us that they were made by scraping the first layer of sand away and exposing another color of sand.

There was no electricity in my room in Nazca until I put the card from my key into the slot labeled ‘main switch’!