On the buses

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This week in South America, we have been mostly... travelling by bus. In just over seven days, we´ve covered well over 1000 miles and spent something like 40 hours on board. (Almost as long as we´ve spent on the lav, but that´s another story.) And tomorrow, when we ship out of Peru and head for Bolivia, we´ve got another 14 hours of the same to look forward to. Can´t wait.

All Peruvian bus journeys are different but somehow the same. Long-haul or short-hop, your journey always seems to take longer than you ever imagined it could. There are always too few seats for the number of people on board, sometimes at a ratio of one to two. The buses play either mad Peruvian music or badly dubbed American videos loud enough to make your backside bleed, often at strange times (for example, slapping on The Omen just as you´re about to bed down for the night). The prevailing stench is a winning combination of fried food, dust and bumpipe so thick that, to paraphrase Murray Walker, you could cut it with a cricket stump. And don´t even get me started on the state of the bogs...

For all that, your bus is easily the best way of getting around Peru. They allow you to cover the vast distances between cities (by English standards) while getting something approaching a kip. They mean that you don´t have to get a cab, and thus allow you to avoid the care-in-the-community types who tend to drive taxis. And they are as cheap as papas fritas. If only you could get some kind of trans-continental bus pass, they would be just about perfect.

Our first bus took us from Cuzco in the south-east of Peru to a town called Ica on the east coast - a 14-hour schlep on twisty mountain roads that wouldn´t have been out of place on the Monte Carlo Rally (which was appropriate, because I´ve been in rally cars driven with less commitment than our bus was). There´s not a lot at Ica, or indeed along most of the eastern coast, except mile after mile of dirty desert sand, but at the nearby oasis town of Huacachina they do offer an activity called sandboarding which, as you´ve probably guessed, is exactly like snowboarding except on sand. Huacachina is surrounded by giant dunes that are fantastic fun to (attempt to) board down, so we duly filled our boots - and indeed just about every other available crevice in our clothes and bodies with sand. Eight days on, I am still picking the stuff out of my earlobes, which is every bit as disgusting as it sounds.

Sandboarding was great, but (a) we were rubbish at it and (b) dragging your board back up dunes after your pathetic attempts to get down them is the most knackering thing you can imagine. The answer is to take a dune buggy tour, wherein a nutter in a V8-engined spaceframe buggy takes about nine of you to the top of various dunes and waits for you to scrape, tumble and gurn your way to the bottom. This would be brilliant if it wasn´t for the fact that a nutter is at the wheel and the V8s in question are invariably on the point of eternal combustion: one buggy conked out on us on the way home (a relief, as I was expecting us to be showered with boiling engine oil at any moment) and we waited about 10 eerie minutes in the darkening desert waiting to be rescued.

Luckily, plenty of light relief was provided by Lindsay and Valerie, two friends we made on the Inca trail who happened to be in Huacachina at the same time as us. If you´re reading, ladies, hope your travels in Ecuador are up to snuff.

After Huacachina, we caught another bus two hours down the coast to Nazca, home of the famous Nazca Lines - huge chalk lines and drawings including a spider, hummingbird and monkey across about 300 square miles of desert that can only be appreciated from the air. They date from pre-Incan times and apparently were used as a combined calendar, water-table indicator and fault-line monitor by their originators - that, at any rate, is what Viktoria Nikitzki reckons. Viktoria is a mad old German bird who is a self-styled guardian of the lines, raising awareness through twice-nightly lectures - or at least, haranguing anybody who turns up about how the imminent destruction of the lines is all their fault. We spent an interesting but highly uncomfortable hour looking at a giant scale model in her backyard, during which she constantly invited questions only to dead-bat them with five-word answers and generally demonstrated herself adept in the art of the awkward silence. We did a runner, tales between legs, at the end.

Most people take a flight to see the lines. Being tight and skint, we took a bus - to a place called El Mirador where you can see them from about thirty feet up. Up there, we could see what Viktoria was on about: the lines are surprisingly delicate, faded marks of chalk that must look spectacular from the skies but are clearly in dire need of maintenance. They are barely fenced off from the main Carretera Panamericana highway and there are tyre marks and litter all over them. The government, apparently, does not give a monkey´s, but I shudder to think how many people´s livelihoods would be threatened if, as Viktoria predicts, they were to be wiped out by flooding: thousands of people live in the nearby town of Nazca and there is absolutely nothing there but the lines.

Suitably chastened, we hopped on the night bus for a 10-hour jaunt to Peru´s second-biggest city, Arequipa - my favourite of our trip so far, all white-stone buildings and warm, friendly people encircled by snow-capped volcanic peaks. You could easily while away a couple of weeks here; we´ll end up with four nights by the time we leave. This is mainly because we´ve just spent three days on a trek to the Colca canyon - at 3191 metres, the world´s second-tallest, and a crazed five-hour bus romp into the surrounding desert.

Colca is an incredible place to go walking, and not only because of its outstanding beauty. On the first day, we plunged all the way down to the bottom of the canyon (great for Adele´s knees, that) and stayed the night in a tiny hamlet that was celebrating having its electricity turned on on Independence Day, three days prior to our arrival. It was our first real experience of what it means to live outside of a big city in Peru - trying to scratch an existence off the land. Or, increasingly, from tourists - the campesinos are cleverly diversifying to guarantee the survival of their way of life, and it´s amazing to behold. The next day, as we were leaving the village, we were invited into a woman´s house, where she had created what she called a ´museum´, but was in fact a small display of everyday rural tools, clothes and food. She stood in front of a bunch of (relatively) rich, white strangers and described life in the village - it was brave, fascinating and not something we´ll forget in a hurry.

After climbing back up the gorge - 1300m in three hours, ouch - we stayed in a town called Cabanaconde, and got up early the next day to catch the bus to Cruz del Condor - one of a handful of places in the world that you can watch wild condors. But first, there was a far more spectacular sight: literally hundreds of campesinos trying to get onto a bus built for half their number so they could go to work. They weren´t to be deterred, though: the aisles were overflowing, babies were dragged through windows and old senoras were climbing three up into the luggage lockers under the bus. Bonkers - but they had to do it because, unlike us, they could not afford the luxury of missing it and hopping on the one. We will never complain about standing on the Tube again.

After that, we went to see the condors - again, amazing, although the spectacle was slightly diminished when our guide, Luis, told us that the cunning locals kept the condors (and tourists) coming back by ´accidentally´ unloading the carcasses of dead donkeys into the bottom of the valley - a win-win situation for all concerned.

So: another great trip in a great, great country. Peru is a fascinating, beautiful, thought-provoking place and - at the risk of sounding like a total berk - we really feel changed by coming here. And with that, it´s time for us to leave. We´ll both be properly gutted to go, if consoled somewhat by the fact that we´ll be back in three weeks´ time to get our connecting flight from Lima, the capital, to Sao Paulo in Brazil. Meanwhile, the bad news is that the buses in Bolivia are meant to be an order of magnitude worse than Peru´s. By exactly how much, we´ll tell you next time - if you can stand any more references to toilets, that is.

Bye for now,

Adele and Rob xxx

PS Homesickness alert: we are gutted gutted gutted to not be around for the birth of Mya ´Plonky´ Shiels to Cam and Wes. Oh no: now there´s THREE of them...

PPS Catchphrase of the week - No3
´Eeeeh, I´ll get you for this, Butler...´

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Photos

Face plant!
Rob tries sandboarding

Lindsay and Val
The Canucks - look guys you´re famous

Nazca lines
It´s a frog, honest

Nazca desert
Just off out for a pint of milk dear

500-year-old cactus
The Peruvian oak

Tempted...
Mule for sale

Rush hour
Queueing Peruvian style

Cruz del Condor
Drop the dead donkey...