After breakfast we are off with our local tour guide, Antonio, to look at the Nazca underground aqua ducts. We had seen a sample yesterday on our dune-buggy ride but had not got a real appreciation for them. We drove about 10 km up the Nazca river valley to one of the sites of these aqua ducts. There are a number of these aqua ducts in the Nazca valley with most still in operation having been maintained by the locale farms for over 1500 years. The site that we visited shows the aqua duct construction quite well. The early Nazca people dug trenches down to the water table from the river or natural springs and then directed the flow to their fields. The water table during the dry season is up to 6 meters below surface. Once the trench was constructed it was covered with timbers and dirt with the "inspection" well left every 15 to 20 meters. These wells are in a cone shape with a spiral path down to the u/g aqua duct. The farm uses these inspection wells for access to the duct to enable maintenance on it. It was an impressive site as you look along ~600 metes with 10 to 15 of these wells in front of you.
From the site of the Aqua duct we also had an excellent view of the world's largest sand dune. It made for a good photo opportunity.
From the aqua duct it was back to town where we did some shopping for our upcoming bus ride, back to the hotel to check out and over to the bus station for our 11:30 departure for Lima.
The bus ride was uneventful and further confirmed that the land south of Lima is a desert. There were a number of views of dunes closing in on "farms" along the route. We arrived at the Lima bus station just after 7, met our driver from Gadventures and were on our way to the airport by 7:20 pm for our 10:50 flight - lots of time. However the traffic was terrible, our ride was a 40 passenger bus for the two of us making for a great ride. Our driver made the decision to forego the freeway and to take the city streets to the airport, it would prove to be a great ride. We have talked about the traffic and driving of Lima and this drive confirmed it. At one point our drive had to throw the binders on to avoid hitting another bus. Only his mirror got hit! (and yes we always wear our seatbelts).
As we neared the airport our driver was on his mobile quite loudly to get traffic updates (at least that is what we figured, got to learn spanish) and he made the decision to take a one way street (the wrong way). About half way along the street we are flagged down by a policeman. The driver hands the policeman his mobile and in 2 minutes we are back on our way. We assume the driver had a friend high up on the mobile to convince the police officer to allow us the driving infraction privilege. We make the airport with just under two hours. We get the tickets, check our bags, clear security, then clear immigration and have 10 mins for a beer in the VIP lounge (thanks Torex) and are on the plane. It is a 3 and a half hour flight to Santiago.
Photo Notes
1) Julie entering one of the many inspection wells
2) Carol and inspection well. Carol was our travel companion for the Nazca visit
3) View of the "worlds largest sand dune"
4) View of the dry Nazca River, in the distance you can see a small mining operation
5) View of Bougainvillia along the aqua ducts
6) Artistic photo by Julie of the dried petals
7) Julie and Carol buying bananas for the bus ride to Lima
Cheers
Dawson and Julie
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