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Published: March 23rd 2010
Well, in defence of our lazy blogging....we are both struggling with the altitude, and believe it or not, it actually makes us lazier than we usually are.
The last 4 weeks have been a little crazy, even by our travelling standards. After we last blogged, we headed down to Panama to see the Panama Canal....engineers paradise. I’m sure you’re all looking forward to the presentation and multiple videos of the canal when we get back. Stu will be more than pleased to take you through it! What can I say....it was a big canal!
From Panama, we took a flight to Lima, finally arriving in South America. Lima was a massive sprawl of a town and we barely got to see much of it before we moved on south to do 2 weeks of volunteer work in Pisco.
Pisco is a town that was devastated by an earthquake in 2007. We were volunteering with an organisation called Pisco Sin Fronteras, which is completely volunteer run and is slowly helping the town rebuild itself. It’s in the middle of the desert so it was the hardest work that we’ve ever had to do, especially the 8 hour day breaking up concrete with
a sledge hammer. Working with the locals was a real eye-opener, one of the ladies we worked with had spent 48 hours trapped under her table with her two children before she was found, it was only the dog barking outside the house that alerted anybody to the fact she was there. One of the projects that Stu worked on was to build a school out of material we would use to make a flimsy fence. He was really shocked to find out that one of the ladies was actually going to live in it when it was finished. Their website is at: http://www.piscosinfronteras.org/
We also spent one day sitting on a hill because there was a major Tsunami threat after the Chilean earthquake. Apparently all that hit the coast was a big wave, but we weren’t taking any chances!
After Pisco (and once we had recovered from the dreaded ‘Pisco belly’), we headed south to a town called Nazca. It’s a strange place with a secret in the desert. One of the ancient civilisations had created lines in the sand by cutting away the sun bleached rock. The weird thing is, they can only be seen from the
Crazy buses in Panama
Complete with blarring music!air, so we took a ride in the smallest plane I’ve ever seen to take a look. They were mainly animals, monkeys, humming birds and some strange pictures that no one really understood. I like to think it’s like ancient graffiti.
From there we moved on to Cuzco, a very quiet town now that Machu Picchu is closed. We spoilt ourselves for our wedding anniversary and stayed in a nice hotel. Cuzco was lovely despite the disappointment of not being able to do the famous Inca trail. Stuart even managed to find a pie shop!
Lots of Love
Stuart and Lisa
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Amanda Gardiner
non-member comment
Wow
Its amazing that you are getting to see things in Peru that are on my itinerary! I was fascinated by Nazca when my friend did it 10 years ago and it has made we want to go ever since. Hope I get my trip booked soon, as I would love to be there at the end of May.