Advertisement
Arriving in the Miraflores district of Lima felt like arriving back in the West. Seeing Starbucks for the first time in 3 months, new buildings made out of materials other than reinforced concrete in a city on the sea felt a bit like we´d accidentally sidetracked to Australia or somewhere. We spent our time in Lima mostly pottering about tracking down some food recommendations that we were given in Ecuador. This included a small hole in the wall seafood place which did amazing cebiche (raw seafood in lime with onion and a chilli kick very different from Ecuadorian ceviche) with fried fish pieces and rice with seafood, all very popular in Peru just good versions of each part. We also went on a food tour in a very pretty well maintained old district of the city. The tour turned out to be a lot more boozy than tours we have done in the past and culminated in a night of drinking the local grape spirit Pisco until the early hours but did also include some lovely food.
On our last day we did venture into the centre of the city, which is more of a typical South American
city than the outskirts. We will be returning to Lima on the first leg of our trip home so left the museums for a later date and just enjoyed the atmosphere of the city without rushing about.
After Lima it was only a short bus to Paracas a coastal village which is very touristy. We came to Paracas to take a boat out to some of the ¨guano¨ islands to see sea lions and the birds that made the islands so valuable (and still do since the last guano mining was in 2011). The desert national park on the coast is currently being updated so unfortunately our visit there was not the best as there was only a small area accessible.
Another short bus ride took us to Huacachina which neither of us had a clear expectation of only knowing that you could visit sand dunes from there. On arriving we found a perfect oasis lake ringed by green trees in the centre of huge sand dunes we found it an unexpectedly lovely. We had two aims in town, to see the dunes and to visit a pisco vineyard. In a developing theme for
Peru the vineyard tour invloved very little visiting of vines or explaination of how its made and very much drinking of pisco, 15 small shots later and we were deposited into a taxi to go sandbording! In the taxi, emboldened by the pisco we practised our spanish conversation skills with our companions who turned out to be a lovely couple from Colombia who, as ever for Colombians, were keen to know what we made of our visit to their country.
The ride into the desert was pretty spectacular, it a bit hair raising at times. The desert was a lot bigger than I had realised, streaching as far as I could see in three directions. Then our driver took us to the top of a dune, gave us a sandboard and set us off down the other side. Chris managed to stay on his feet for most of the dunes, until we got to the really tall ones and were told we had to lie down, I wimped out and went for lying down on the board instead which was fun but did mean I was coated in sand even managing to get a fair bit in
my pockets.
We ummed and ahhhed a lot about going to Nasca to see the lines and are really happy we went. The town is in the middle of a baren desert and there´s almost nothing else to do there other than fly over the lines. We found a reputable company with a good safety record and set off early in the morning before the heat of the day caused too much turbulance. It was a fantastic 30 minute flight where the plane dipped from side to side to give everyone in the 6 seater plane a view of the 14 or so ´diagrams´, triangles and huge rectangles, it´s no suprise they weren´t seen until people started flying over in the mid 20th Century.
A 15 hour night bus brought us to Cusco, the prettiest ton in Peru and entry point to the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu. After a day or two of getting our bearing we went to the much less well known site of Pisac which lacked MP´s dramatic location but had the benefit of being very quiet when we were there, especial when we accidentally entered a prohibited area and
we had it to ourselves!
There are hundreds of different was of getting to Machu Picchu Pueblo (base camp for MP as it were) varying from walking alone along the train tracks to tours costing hundreds of pounds lasting several days that include rafting and mountain biking staying at hotels along the way. As is our way, we chose the middle option and got a train from the nearby (and unpronouncable) town of Ollantaytambo.
We stayed overnight in MP Pueblo and headed off at 4.45 the next morning to walk up the hill in order to be at the ruins for sunrise. It´s always tricky when you have so many expectations of a place, especially when we´d been at the deserted and beautiful Pisac the day before, but MP absolutely lived up to its reputation. We were very lucky, there was dense cloud the day before we went and dense cloud the day after, but on our day the sky was clear as a bell and sunrise was utterly spectacular. It was never quiet there, steadily getting busier from opeing at 6am until when we left at midday, but for the most part the
crowds weren´t an issue. Probably our favourite experience there was walking a distance away to the various entry gates and seeing the ruins with the cloud forest in the background. LLamas happily wandered around acting t the ruin´s grass mowers. It was expensive and not simple to organise but was more than worth all the effort we put into it.
We returned to Ollantaytambo which was a very pretty town and spent 2 days pottering around there, seeing more ruins, which were so numerous we came across them haphazardly walking around the local area and generally enjoying not staying in a dorm room for a little while.
Now we're back in Cusco checking out the museums and watching the crazy fiesta which is happening over a few days and is a strange mix of Catholicism and local Andean culture and figuring out what we need to see in Peru before meeting Ian (Alice´s brother) in La Paz in 10 days time.
(apologies for any terrible spelling/grammer, there's no spell check and the a doesn´t work properly)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.055s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0355s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb