Drawing a line in the sand

Thanks to some very nice big reclining leather VIP seats on a very first-class bus, VJ was convinced to endure about 7 hours of bus ride each way, for one 30-minute fly-over of the Nazca lines.

The Nazca lines are a strange mystery located in the desert of western Peru, near the town of Nazca. Throughout the desert, gigantic figures (100 metres +) have been drawn on the desert floor, by the Nazca civilization over a thousand years ago. They take the form of hummingbirds, condors, monkeys, whales, and many are done with such precision that lines continue for 100 metres, perfectly straight and parallel. There are also hundreds of large geometric shapes (mostly long triangles) and straight lines that extend for kilometres, perfectly. What is even more mind-boggling is that the figures are so large that they can not even be seen or comprehended from ground level. They were not even discovered until this century when flights started travelling over the area. In fact, the PanAmerican highway runs right over some of the figures because they didn't realize they were there.

Not only does it make you wonder how they were able to draw these figures and do it so precisely, it also makes you wonder WHO or WHAT they did it for? If the pictures can only be understood from above, who were they for?
A woman from Germany devoted 40 years of her life to trying to figure this out. She looked at relationships between the lines and the patterns of the sun, stars, etc., but never did come up with an answer.

Veronica and I took to the air in a little 4-seater plane to get a good look at the figures. The pilot was an excellent guide who made sure that all 3 tourists got the ideal view of each figure. He would bank the small plane completely on to its side and do an entire circle around the figure, only to then quickly whip the plane onto its other side, saying "and now on the right side of the plane"....
After half an hour of this over and over again, VJ and I were pretty green but managed to make it back to the ground without using the plastic bags....
We hung out in our hotel room for about an hour before we felt ready to go out again.