Cholitas Luchadoras Redux (Plus Nazca Lines)

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, my photojournalist friend in La Paz, finally sent me some of his incredibly strange images of Cholita Wrestling in El Alto, Bolivia. Although his photos are literally NY Times quality (I believe this one appeared on Page 1 along with a long profile piece of the wrestling phenomenon last year), I maintain that photos, no matter how good, still don't do this experience justice. You miss out on the jeering, insulting, jello- and orangepeel-throwing crowd, for starters...

And speaking of photographs not doing things justice, the same can be said for my once-in-a-lifetime, 4-seater, stomach-churning flight over the Nazca lines this morning. I got some photos, which I'll be sure to upload later when I have the time, but it's hard to really capture the surreal beauty and mysterious quasi-religious allure these enormous drawings in the desert actually exude when you see them in person. They're ENORMOUS, and no one knows how, or why, the Nazca people created them... or even if it WAS the Nazca: there's more than a handful of kooky UFO theorists out there insisting that the half-mile long perfectly-trapezoidal shapes were actually alien landing strips and not ritualistic markers for sources of water or shamanistic patterns, as some anthropologists theorize. Trippy. Stay tuned for (underwhelming, but still pretty awesome) photos later on...

PS - no reproducing the above image without Noah's express permission. All rights reserved.