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My tour of Peru had finally come around. It wasn’t to be a group tour but the company I had chosen had micro managed my travel plans booking hotels, transport, transfers and entrance tickets. The first of the 14 days started early, a 3.30am pick up.
Bleary eyed I was taken to the bus station in Lima, given all my vouchers for my tour and put on a bus to Paracas. Bus travel had worried me the most about travelling Peru. Stories from fellow travellers of hijackings with guns and night time bus crashes made me nervous. Thankfully the company I was with booked me onto busses with airport type security; metal scanners, passport identification, no ad hoc stops, GPS tracking, baggage identification tags and video footage of all passengers. It would have been hard for me to feel much safer (and not to spoil the next few blogs but nothing untoward happened to me on any bus in Peru).
At 7am we were served a little breakfast and coffee and by 8am we’d arrived in Paracas. The countryside was desert and farming. Where there was no irrigation it was bleak, dusty and arid. Water gave the desert life
in places where lush fields of cotton, beans and corn bloomed. The bus wound through the village, crossed a piece of wasteland for a shortcut and promptly got stuck in the sand. After much spinning of wheels it was decided that this would be a perfectly good place to drop us off after all. Magically my guide appeared and I was whisked away to the pier for my boat ride around Las Islas Ballestas.
Before the boat had even left harbour we passed a pod of dolphins. After a short ride out on pretty calm waters the island came into sight. The soft rock and the relentless sea had created arches and caves but birds and seals had made this beautiful place home. Thousands of terns and cormorants filled the sky or fought for a space on the rock. Even the odd pelican and penguin could be seen. Part of the island looked in shadow but in reality it was millions of nesting birds on the island. As the birds flew out to sea and returned they formed an orderly highway in the air, exiting birds flew on the right, incoming on the left. The sight was impressive; I
almost expected to run into Simon King filming for a nature programme on the BBC.
The real stars of the show however were the sea lions. They occupied every hidden bay and rocky outcrop, sleeping in the sun, having noisy arguments or just bobbing up and down in the sea having a good old nosey at us in the boat. And the sheer numbers of them were awesome, hundreds of them, from pups to imposing adult males. All too soon we were heading back to shore.
A private transfer took me via a winery to Ica. The winery had made Pisco for hundreds of years. Peru’s favourite alcoholic tipple is Pisco sours; Pisco brandy, egg white and lemon juice. We were given a short guided tour of the antiquated methods before being given a taste of the brandy at different stages of fermentation. In Ica I visited the Regional Museum. This housed a collection of pre-Inca pottery, textiles and mummies. The Nasca peoples wrapped their dead in textiles in the fetal position (going out of the world as they came in). The dry heat of the desert mummified them without the need for embalming. The glass cases displayed shrunken
heads, trophy heads and full mummy’s complete with skin, teeth and hair. There was a morbid fascination about the place.
Next stop was lunch at Huacachina beside the pool. Huacachina is the classic oasis; a lagoon surrounded by palm trees in the sand dunes (with the odd hotel to boot). It was picture postcard stuff. Before I had digested my lunch I was strapped into a dune buggy with 7 other people.
The buggy sped off. We reached a steep sand dune and duly drove right up it. Suddenly I was surrounded by rolling dunes on all sides. It was another world. The buggy climbed higher and we had views over the endless peaks of sand. My stomach lurched as the driver tore down the sheer drops of the dunes to whoops of delight from the other passengers. It was like being on a thrill ride in a theme park without the safety rail! Then it was time to do a bit of sandboarding. The driver pulled up at the top of a hill, pulled out the boards and sent us on our merry way. Some decided to stand and surf down the dune but I (with no
sense of balance) opted to sit on the board. I still managed to fall off and tumble the last half of the slope. I didn’t realise how hard you fall on sand. It felt like I’d hit a wall but after a minute or two to recover and dust off the sand, I tried the next hill with a little more success.
It was incredible desert experience. It’s funny but I can see why Marcello from Australia was so taken with snow. I find I’m fascinated by desert. I don’t love the desert but I too am fascinated by landscape that's the opposite too what I can find at home.
More desert awaited at Nasca.
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