The Ballestas Islands and Huacachina

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Here in Huacachina - a small tourist village at a lagoon in the middle of the desert near the larger city of Ica.

Great weather here during the day, lots of sun as you would expect it being the desert, but cold at night.

Pretty much the best thing to do here (and the only one!) is the sand boarding and dune buggy riding. It is fantastic fun, racing around in the desert in the buggies - its pretty similar to a rollercoaster ride, with the massive sand dunes providing some wild ups and downs. The drivers of the buggies are almost as crazy as the taxi drivers in Lima! Unfortunately you can´t rent individual ones to use yourself ...

Sand boarding is cool, but far more fun (when you have no experience of boarding of any kind!) is getting on your belly and tabogganing down. You reach some serious speeds doing it that way. Got totally wiped out the second time I did it (I wish I could have got it videod) - came flying down and hit a small drift sending me crashing head over heels into the sand! Ouch ... still not as painful as
The city of Ica, from the dunes
the rock-solid beds though.

The Ballestas Islands, or Poor Man´s Galapagos, was amazing for wildlife. Thousands of birds cover the remote and rocky islands, a 15 minute speedboat ride from the shore. Couldn´t tell you the names of any of the birds there, I was at the back of the boat with the guide at the front, so I couldn´t hear a thing - there were also sealions and dolphins (which I had already seen in Mancora when sitting on the beach :P). Didn´t see any whales but still fantastic.

A little inland of the Ballestas on the coast was the big salt desert, now nature reserve. Usually there are loads of flamingoes here, but typically, they had all left the previous day! Ah well.

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Comments

[Rob]

Your looking rarther tanned!