Advertisement
Published: June 25th 2009
Edit Blog Post
Tim Version:
* Saw a hell of a lot of birds, penguins, sea lions and other wildlife.
* Also saw just what an earthquake can do to a town with basically build buildings, its incredible.
The version dodging the dropping bird poop:
Islas Ballestas, with the tag of "The poor man's Galapogos" is a place I wasn't sure if I wanted to see or not but I was really feeling the need to see the ocean and some wildlife so that pointed to me being insane not to do it, and I'm glad I went.
Leaving from Lima very very early in a very comfy Cruz Del Sur bus gave it a good start. You get some great desert views as the sunlight slowly creeps up over the surrounding sand dunes and dusty mountains, and they continue all the way to Paracas. There are some very large shanty towns I saw along the way, along with many buildings with only the walls still left and never a roof to be found. In my half asleep dazed state I forgot all about the fact that this place had been rocked by a serious earthquake only a few
years previous and I was just thinking ahh here we go, another purpose built town now with no purpose and left to rot. Once it dawned on me just why there was so much destruction around, the view took on a whole new much more somber meaning. What an earthquake can do to such basically built structures is truly amazing and devastating. Also when it happens to a country without the economic strength to rebuild afterwards, the destruction is all the worse. It also most likely explained some of the shanty towns, as they weren't just the poor congregating together but rather perhaps those still displaced by the loss of their homes in years previous.
Paracas itself is a little place (at least now) which appears to just exist for the use of fishing and tourism to the islands. I arrived and got picked up by the tour agency I'd signed up with, albeit after a very confusing conversation in which I was ignoring them as I thought they were trying to sell me a tour when in fact they were trying to tell me that they WERE the tour and was I meant to be with them heh.
We drive into town, a very short drive away, and found that the morning was still too misty to go so we chilled for an hour or so in the office. The office workers were hilarious and the time passed quickly and before I knew it I was on a speeding boat out towards the Islas Ballestas along with 2 other boats worth of camera toting tourists.
The cruise out takes you past the El Candelabro which looks like a big candle stick, and you get the spiel about how nobody knows how it was created and of course it gets likened to the Nazca Lines. It is indeed something pretty cool to look at, but I wouldn't quite compare it to the lines... Continuing on out, the islands become more and more spectacular as you near them, blackdots turning out to be dense clusters of birdlife and other animals. You see the odd Sea Lion bobbing around taking a swim along the way too, causing me a little concern about the speed we were going at and the danger of the boat and propeller combined towards these beautiful creatures.
Once out there we cruised around the islands,
taking in all the sights and taking a million photos of everything we could see. The guide did explain what some of the animals were but I think most of us were too busy focusing our cameras and snapping away to listen unfortunately. Something that I think only one person in the boat copped (or at least only one person admitted anyway) was the deposits of one of the many low flying birds over our heads, something I'd been warned to wear a hat for. The sheer number of the birds is amazing, and the fact that no in flight crashes were seen is a real testiment to their abilities, although to be fair it really reminded me a lot of latin american driving in general as it is complete chaos but somehow seems to exist as organised chaos that everyone can deal with.
The birds, while amazing, have nothing on the Sea Lions and Penguins that you get to see. The Penguins are in smaller numbers than anything else but you still see plenty to quench that wildlife watching appetite, but the Sea Lions are the real show. They kinda crawl and lump around, ever so graceful in
the water and completely goofy on land, often stopping to fight with a neighbour a bit or jossling for a better position on the beach or rocks. You see them all over the place up on fairly high looking difficult to reach ledges and it got me thinking how the hell do they get up there! Heh well my answer was kind of answered by a few we saw trying to do just that... it looks difficult, clumsy, and almost impossible for them, and if they make it up on the 10th time then that seemed like a pretty good average from what we saw! Its one of those scenes from nature like The Far Side comic strip with the deer gracefully jumping over a fallen tree just like in Bambi just for you to notice that it has connected its antlers with the tree above is about to take a spectacular fall from grace. It had me in stitches when one extremely large one tried to get up on a rather small ledge and when it failed it just went tumbling backwards into the ocean, taking out another Sea Lion who itself had only just finally managed to get
out of the pulsing swell up onto another ledge.
You also get to see the rather serious but now rather delapitated setups for mining the bird poop, and how the animals have taken it all over now. The operation appeared to still be running as we spotted a solo worker outside some rather abandoned looking buildings having his morning coffee reading a newspaper, but if it is still running then it looks to have been chronically cut down in operation size, hopefully for the protection of the animals.
We even got a look at some dolphins on the way back with some good luck, and before I knew it I was back on dry land in time to catch another bus quickly onwards to Ica to visit Huacachina and its crazy sand dunes to get some sandboarding cranking!! I gotta admit though, although the ocean and area wasn't the type thats inviting to swim in, just the fact that it was water and it was the ocean and it was open and seemingly endless made me so so happy and I missed it being back on the bus!! Theres something about floating out there on a boat with
the endless sky above you, the seemingly endless ocean beneath you, a blue horizon that you can't see over in the distance and, if far enough out to sea, with that endless horizon on all sides so that is so freakin freeing and good feeling. Heh until the boat engine siezes up... then its just a little scary but up until that point it is absolute bliss. Think I might start some ocean kayaking when I get back, that should satisfy the freedom finding urge that cities give me, plus its killer fitness, aaand it keeps me sane on days when the swell is way too flat to surf. Thoughts like that of stuff I'll do when I get home keep me happy enough to head inland again for a bit longer...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.052s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 13; qc: 32; dbt: 0.0227s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb