Nazca

It is the first time that I feel like I would quite like to stop carrying around a backpack and chill in front of a TV...I arrived here this morning after a very long bus ride and went to visit everything there is to see here - ie the Nazca lines and a bunch of Nazca mummies in a cemetery - so tomorrow's general strike permitting I will be able to get out of here. These huge lines, depicting birds, snakes, spiders and the like, that you can only really see from an airpane are impressive, but I felt like seeing a good documentary on them on National Geographic would have been just as good...(Perhaps this was because I was really tired and misled as to what was included in the price of my little tour, not sure.) Anyway, these Nazcas apparently did the lines sometime between 300 B.C. and 700 A.D. and nobody is really sure how they did them and what teir purpose was. Several archeologists and anthropologists (and the obligatory UFO experts, of course) have devoted a lot of time to thinking up theories but none of them are fully convincing.

Defying political correctness, a middle-aged Spanish guy (and an Ibiza dweller at that...) that I met a few days ago next to some Inca ruins espoused the theory that these indigenous cultures, including the Inca, are inferior to European (and other) cultures because they centered around the life of their god'like leaders, there is no evidence of writing, the art is really primitive, etc, and anyway, it is easy to blame the Spaniards for everything - they just happened to be superior. I, of course, disagreed with him and pointed out that the culture suited their environment and their way of life and they were pretty good at architecture, astrology and were getting by just fine until the colonizers came. I still think that is true, but I also have to concede that there certainly are more "impressive" cultures out there.