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Published: June 10th 2010
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Sunset in MancoraAfter our Inca trail we went back to Cusco which is stunningly beautiful but tourist central. Everywhere we went we got pestered by people selling jewellery, artwork, offering massages and manicures, drink deals, food...you name it we got pestered for it. Admitedly the day after the Inca trail we did relent, Harry and I had a fantastic massage to ease our tired muscles for the pricey amount of 5 pounds for the hour. The city is filled to the brim with historical sights, Inca ruins and Colonial religious sights - quite often the two are intermingled following the spanish methods of building Churches ontop of Incan temples, a prime example being Koricancha where the Spanish Catholics attempted to use existing Inca religious temples within their architecture but adapted their meaning. We spent most of our days here wandering the small winding streets taking in a few historical sites and dining with the all the thousands of Israelis at the delicious bagel cafe, hummus has never tasted so good! Alongside its stunning scenery, numerous historical sights and beautiful location Cusco is also famous for its crazy nightlife. Walking around the main square at night you are literally hounded with drink offers and
practically dragged to bars. It is all good quality fun with plenty of dancing on the bar and free drinks, no cause to complain! One night the girls left early and I had met up with an Aussie guy I knew from La Paz called Tom, this guy definitely needs an introduction - while being one of the most geniune and loveliest people I have ever met he was also the craziest - spending the night in notorious San Pedro prison volunteerily is just one example. Well I ended up party to a slightly hair-raising incident on a side street from the square, he wandered up to a friend he had recently met, the guy high-fived him slapping three grams of cocaine into his hand just as a policeman approached him from behind, what ensued was a pretty scary incident of him being dragged off by said policeman while he was protesting his complete innocence. After minutes of frantic discussion, bribes were accepted and we were both pretty completely shaken, there are times that being in a corrupt country has its advantages! It was possibly the first warning I have had on my trip here that you just can´t trust
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Santa Cantalina Monastery, Arequipa everyone you travel with, his ´friend´deserved shooting for saving himself setting Tom up in such a manner.
After a couple of days in Cusco, we headed overnight to Arequipa with the aim to visit Colca Canyon one of the deepest canyons in the world. Annoyingly in Peru most of the overnight journeys are not quite long enough so you end up arrriving at some god-forsaken hour of the morning, this journey was no exception. We spent the day exploring the town, which was pretty pleasant colonial town with the stunning El Misti volcano towering above it semi-active, in some respects Arequipa maintains a pretty precarious position if it were ever to erupt. We spent most of the afternoon exploring Santa Catalina Convent which is quite literally a town within a town it contained so many nuns up until the mid-twentieth century. One or a few nuns shared small houses arranged along named streets, allocated around small square, it was a pretty surreal yet interesing place. Slightly stupidly on our part we had decided to a day trip to the Colca Canyon the following day which departed 2.30am, so yet another night with no sleep. We were bundled into a
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santa catalina monastery, arequipa mini van and slept the few hours until breakfast in a town on the edge of the canyon. The rest of the morning we spent driving along the top of the Canyon to Condor´s Cross passing huge sweeping terraced valleys, a small village market complete with an introduction to a baby alpaca - finally reaching the highest point to watch the condors. This was without doubt the highlight of the day, we were so lucky that we got to see so many of the huge majestic birds so close, they were literally just skimming our heads at times. Trying to photograph them was one of the most frustrating things, as they soar so fast and change direction so quickly! The Canyon is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the States, but the full magnitude of its depth cant fully be appreciated as you cant see the bottom. After we retraced our steps to languish in some natural thermal paths, which was undeniably very pleasant. Now the day should have been amazing, but unfortunately we had, a tour guide who can only be described as the worst on the planet. He was incredibly patronising, annoying, and boring. It may
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arequipa sound very ungrateful to say this but after months and months of mountain scenery I dont think either Harry or I fully appreciated this day trip. That same night after returning to Arequipa we boarded yet another night bus, this time to Nazca.
Again we arrived in Nazca at a ridiculous hour of the morning, with the aim of taking a flight over the Nazca lines first thing the following morning. Unfortunately due to the weather we had to wait to the following day, so decided to explore Nazca - an interesting choice. Nazca is very much a desert town made up of dirt roads, square concrete block houses, and not much else. It was a bit of a shock after the colonial beauty of both Arequipa and Cusco. After wondering around the tiny market, and getting myself a hippie hair braid we had pretty much experienced all the small town itself had to offer, so ventured just outside of town to Chauchilla cemetery. Now describing this cemetery is difficult, its not your standard cemetery, it is literally a selection of open graves including skeletons complete with clothing and hair preserved by the sand in the middle of the
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cusco night out desert. These skeletons have survived since pre-Inca times, and are scarily still very human. It was in many ways the most bizarre experience, highly irreverent, and very south american - I cannot imagine there are many other places where such precious historical objects would be treated with such disdain. Wandering around the site our guide illustrated that we were walking over so far unexcuvated graves and he openly encouraged us to jump on them, jumping on graves has never really been my scene so I avoided that one!
The following morning we were able to take our highly expensive and brief flight over the Nazca lines. There were six of us in a tiny Sesna plane, a pilot and co-pilot although we never fully established whether or not he was still learning to fly. We set off, all was good until we were above the first line drawn in the desert and then they turned the plane to some ridiculous angle and we all started feeling a little strange. It was amazing to see them though, and such a mystery how they ended up there, and why - there are figures of a whale, spider, condor, and hummingbird which were
all my favourites. Coming into land our co-pilot and with very detailed instructions from the pilot successfully managed to land the plane - a slighly uneasy moment though! That afternoon we got on the local bus to Ica before continuing to the edge of town to a small desert oasis village called Huacachina, where we spent a few days lounging by the pool trying to top up the tans, and going bug riding and sand boarding. It was an awesome few days, we met some great people, and had a strange night out in a bar/club where there were more dogs than customers, all good wholesome fun though! The sand bugging and boarding was absolutely incredible fun, we were all strapped in, us three girls in the back seat. For future reference the back seat in the ejector seat, the follwing day we had bruises in the most unfortunate of places. After a while of racing and whooping up and down dunes rollercoaster style we had our first go at sandboarding. Lying on our fronts ontop of a piece of wood shaped like a skateboard polished with wax we went racing headfirst down the dunes. The more you put your
feet into the sand the slower you went, it took me a while to grasp this concept so my first runs were pretty hairaising. We spent literally hours going down the dunes in various positions, until we reached some dunes of mammoth proportions and plunged headfirst down near vertical dunes - the best adreneline rush!
The following day we jumped on another local bus for a few hours to Lima so that Lou could catch her flight home, thereby ended an insane eight days of very little sleep and squeezing as many activities into the smallest space of time. Neither Harry or I were particularly anamoured with the idea of Lima, I have heard very few positive comments about the place and Harry had already visited as a child and hated it - it did not bode well. Unfortunately for us our premonitions turned out to be correct, Lima has got to be one of the dullest and ugliest capital cities to exist. It has no soul or energy at all. We did some very shameful things which I am duty bound to admit, but am not proud of, although after 4 months of travelling I think entirely allowed!
We hit the shopping mall by the sea front for the day and indulged in pizza hut and starbucks - it tasted so good and reminded us so much of home! After waving Lou goodbye it was time to head up north to beaches, and sun - a huge excitement for both of us after months of altitude and mountains!
On the way to the beach resort Mancora we decided to stop off in a place called trujillo, our original plan was to spend a few days in a small surfing village called Huanchaco and chill out before hitting party central. Unfortunately for us after our night bus from Lima we were dismayed to find that the weather was significantly less pleasant than anticipated so we made yet another crazy decision to take two night buses in succession. While we were in the city we did visit some of the unusual historical sites in the vicinity - firstly the Chan Chan complex a huge ruined city that stretches across the Moche valley inhabited by the people of the Chimu Empire a civilisation that appeared on the Peruvian coast 1100 AD before being incorporated into the Inca Empire in the
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condor colca canyon late fifteenth century. It is a massive adobe city, partly preserved which is an amazing fact considering its location on the coast and that its base material is sand. It is huge, massive squares lead off into small corridors with designs covering the walls, in some places the walls are made out cut out patterns and designs. There are no artefacts from this civilisation left unfortunately due to the graves and remains of the city being pillaged by Spanish invaders. After wandering around the city, we went to the remains of two pyramids from the Moche culture which preceeded the Chimu Empire (400 to 600 AD). The pyramids are known as Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna, of the two only Huaca de la Luna has been excavated while Huaca del Sol is apparently the largest adobe structure in the whole of the Americas. The frescoes within Huaca del la luna are stunning, bright and well preserved, they are still excavating the sight and are constantly discovering new frescoes as they dig down among the layers that make up the pyramid. Having visited both of these sites we then needed to kill some time before taking our overnight
bus, so we made the brilliant decision to go and have ourselves manicured and pedicured for a couple of pounds for the pleasure!
It would not be a proper update without at least some commentary on the bus journeys on every bus journey we have our photos taken and on our journey from trujillo to mancora we had to give our finger prints as well. While its nice to know they make the effort it is not exactly reassuring, especially when we turned to the girl next to us to ask what it was for and she just calmly said incase of accidents and they need to identify you. Apparently only the better bus companies make the extra effort!
I dont know where to start with Mancora, we had an absolutely awesome time, although it was very slightly marred as the location of mine and harry´s first argument since travellling, not bad considering we have been travelling for 4 months 24/7! Anyway, we were staying in Loki del mar which can only be described as a resort for backpackers complete with pool, poolside bar, and beachfront location who could ask for more?! It was admittedly a bit ´18-30s´with
pool games, drinking games, hours of bar dancing and incestous relations between guests, but it was alot of fun. Our time there was made a million times better by the fact we were joined by a huge group of friends we had met earlier in our trip, it was so lovely to see them all again but sad that we had to say goodbye to so many them here. We spent our days sunbathing by the beach or the pool, watching the sunset on the beach with beers, returning to Loki for hours of night time entertainment before hitting the beach bars when Loki closed, or jumping in tuk-tuks and driving them around the place. Mancora is currently undergoing a bit of an explosion in construction so many nights were spent in half constructed bars, basically in a building site, we all injured ourselves at least once. After 6 nights of constant and heavy partying we were definitely ready to hit the road again and get ourselves to Ecuador.
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