Whether you’re ballooning over the Himalayas or hovering above feeding whales, some sights are best experienced from on high.

The hum of the single-engine Cessna fills your ears as you ascend above the Peruvian high desert. Below you, flat expanses of dry, brown earth extend in every direction, punctuated only by twisting dry riverbeds…a lifeless landscape. Then the plane banks, and over the intercom the pilot directs you to look at what appear to be just another set of curving, squiggly lines. But then, as you watch, the lines start to come to life, to form a definitive shape…with a spread-finned tail at one end, a gaping mouth at the other, and an eye in the middle, staring up at you: it’s a giant line drawing of a whale, carved right into the landscape.

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