Three weeks with Rajiv Chadha

After a final weekend in Cuzco Raj and I decided to skip town, as we discovered that the much-maligned roadblocks had been lifted for a day. So we got tickets for an overnighter to Arequipa, the lovely colonial city to the south where I had already been. I had vowed to avoid overnighters after the nightmare 12 hour stint to La Paz last month, but it seemed like our sole window to escape Cuzco. However, we we merely an hour out of town when we realised the roadblocks were still very much happening. A ten hour journey took 15, the majority of which, thanks to a fistful of Diazepam, I slept through. I was very much awake, however, when a protester flung a rock through the window of our bus, luckily injuring no-one. You wouldn't get this sort of grief on Wallace Arnold coaches...

We arrived safely in Arequipa without any blunt force trauma to the head (How many times have we written that phrase Ellie!) and proceeded to enjoy the perfect weather and the hostel hammocks. I have justified doing very little this last few weeks as it is 'Raj's holiday', and he, understandably, wants to eat well, sleep in and relax. Who am I to stop him and make him hike up mountains with me?

We had a brilliant Halloween night in Arequipa where everybody in the hostel dressed up - photos later - and then headed off to Nazca for the famous lines. For those who have never heard of them, they are a mysterious collection of drawings carved into the rocks by pre-Incan people. They are so enormous the only way to see them is in a light aircraft. There is a monkey, a spider, a hummingbird, amongst many other drawings - but nobody really knows what they were meant for. A German scientist devoted her life to studying the lines, but all her theories, and indeed all the theories surrounding them sound like pure conjecture. She claimed the lines represented an astronomical calendar, others say it was for water rituals, and there are other even more dubious hypotheses, such as the idea that the Nazca people had invented primitive hot air balloons and could see the designs themselves. Either way, they are intriguing. A combination of turbulence, and the pilot banking the tiny plane left and right all the time to see the lines, makes everybody feel sick, and me actually sick. Still, worth it.

From Nazca we went further north to a tiny desert oasis resort called Huacachina, a series of hotels and hostels surrounding a lagoon, with enormous, Old Testament sand dunes surrounding the area. Raj and I had a go at sandboarding (on our fronts, didnt even bother attempting to do it properly, but then nobody there did either). We also got a white-knuckle dune buggy ride over the dunes which was fun too.

From Huacachina we made our way to the grimy, sprawling capital of Lima, where Raj has just this morning flown out of back to the UK. Apart from great food, Lima has very little to offer. There is a sea mist which hangs over the Pacific coast here which makes everything look gloomy for most of the year. You look at the sky here and see Hammersmith on a cold February morning. It is not good for the soul. So tomorrow I am getting a bus up to Mancora, a beach resort in the far north, before finally skipping the country and moving into Ecuador. Volcanoes, the Amazon jungle, possibly the Galapagos Islands, and the equator, await...

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