54 November 2015 www.womanthismonth.com LIFESTYLE | travel Mapping the Mystical Who doesn’t like a good mystery? Take a trip to some surreal corners of the world with Ankita Mamgain and see if you can uncover the unknown. More than 200,000 people sent in applications when Dutch non-profit company Mars One announced a no-return trip to the Red Planet. Whether Mars One is a hoax or not is a different story; but no one ever imagined such an overwhelming response for a journey into the unknown. It presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of experiencing something truly “out of this world”. It is the thrill of exploration and uncovering mysteries that has brought us this far as a species. We might be ready to uncover the secrets of the universe, but many unsolved mysteries still remain on our own planet that have attracted explorers for centuries and yet still leave many questions unanswered. This month we journey to some of the Earth’s mystical corners. And although we may not find answers, an inexplicable end to a story has a unique hold on our imagination, making these bizarre nooks truly magical. NAZCA LINES, PERU An unexplained archaeological mystery lies etched on the Pampa Desert in the Nazca region of Peru and attracts thousands of archaeologists, scientists, history buffs, newage mystics and curious tourists. These are gigantic geoglyphs of geometric patterns, animals, human figures and thousands of perfectly straight lines which go on for kilometres. The only way to fully observe them is from the sky. Nobody actually knows who made them or why, but visitors have proposed every imaginable explanation – from runways for spaceships to tracks for Olympic athletes, from op art to pop art and astronomical observatories. For the locals these drawings have their own relevance. The monkey, measuring 300 feet (90 metres) in length, has five fingers on one hand and four on the other and is considered to represent the nine months of drought in Nazca. The spider is said to represent fertility and water, as this insect usually appeared before it was going to rain. The hummingbird, condor and flamingo represent the summer and winter solstices and their beaks still point to the exact location the sun rises and sets in Nazca. Make sure to add this day-trip while visiting Peru’s more popular tourist haunt, Machu Picchu. Board a small Cesna aircraft for a scenic air tour over the enigmatic Nazca Lines for an aerial experience of a lifetime! Nazca lines
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