Category: Peru

To see the Nazca Lines at their best, you have to take a plane. Small, four-seater aircraft leave every half-hour. To allow everyone a perfect view, the plane turns once to the left and once to the right while overflying the giant geoglyphs. They were created by removing the top layer of reddish-brown pebbles and thereby revealing a yellow-grey subsoil. In the arid climate of the Sechura desert the lines have remained undisturbed. As they were hardly visible from the ground (they can be seen from the foothills though) they went unnoticed for a long time. […]

Half a year earlier, I had visited the Brazilian Amazon travelling on a boat from Macapá to Sanatarém. Back then, I had learned that some ocean-going vessels can navigate the Amazon up to Iquitos about 3,600 kilometres inland. The Amazon is a river like no other, its average outflow is five times higher than the second mightiest river on earth. The Amazon Basin is huge, covering 35,5 percent of the South American continent. Although mostly associated with Brazil, the basin also covers Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and smaller parts of Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname. […]

Traditionally, Peru is divided into three geographic areas. The highlands of the Andes, the low-lying coastal areas and the Selva, the forest, the Peruvian part of the Amazon basin. I enter along the coast but immediately take a bus to the highlands. After mostly spending the last months close to or at sea level, I have to get myself used to the altitude again. […]