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Published: September 19th 2008
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Travel Diary
The front cover of my travel diary, complete with immigration stamps Peru: Part I - Buses, Bodegas and Boarding - by George
If
Family Fortunes asked 100 people to name a tourist attraction in South America you'd be in the money if you guessed
Machu Picchu. With our increasingly relaxed attitude to planning, we'd allocated 2 weeks to Peru and the only fixed thing on the To-Do-List was a hike to the former Inca city.
We'd left Loja on a night bus for Piura in the north of Peru. With border formalities, including a stamp in my travel diary, completed at 3:30am we were in to the World's 20th largest country and set for our next adventure.
On arrival in Piura we donned our 'sacks, dodged the waiting touts and performed the now standard
"1,500m search for a hotel in the Sun"; something we have still yet to master in terms of keeping a sense of humour. after a couple of hours we'd recharged the batteries enough to hit the town and see the sights. In retrospect we'd completely overbudgeted in the sleep department and only 40 winks would have sufficed as Piura was remarkably unremarkable... after we'd seen the cathedral's exterior, walked around the ubiquitous Plaza de Armas
Bodega
Kate outside our first Bodega and had lunch at a local restaurant we headed down to the bus terminal and booked tickets on the first night bus to Lima (16 hours).
If you'd suggested to me 12 months ago that to get on back-to-back night buses was a good idea, I'd have told you to stop being stupid and pointed you in the direction of Easyjet. Sadly low cost airlines do not exist in South America (some have tried and failed), so unless you fancy paying several hundred dollars the only option is bussing it 100's of kilometres at a time. At least our Latino friends are on top of their game in this respect, with buses coming in semi or full-cama (bed) class.
I've yet to meet someone who likes Lima and Footprint's choice of "Loud", "Brash" and "Foggy" as adjectives only reinforced our decision to jump on yet another bus, this time to Ica, Peru's chief wine centre and home to some enormous sand dunes.
A
blink and you'll miss it 5 hours later we were in Ica and shunned the
"1,500m search for a hotel in the Sun" in favour of a tuk-tuk to a recommended hotel in the
Harry Potter
An old version of the teenage wizard served us some Pisco in our second Bodega of the day book. I think old age was catching up on us as we definitely took the easy option and checked in despite the $10 hike in prices; oh well, at least their refusal to haggle on prices guaranteed us sole occupancy of the hotel for a couple of nights!
Whilst in Ica we got firmly back in to tourist mode, with a couple of nice meals , a trip around various bodegas (vineyards) to sample the local wine and Pisco (Peru's famous brandy) and a morning sand boarding in the dunes. Sandboarding's one of those things that I'd always imagined would be a great idea ruined by putting it in to practise. I'm happy to say that I had been wrong and we had a fantastic time being driven around in a dune buggy and then screeching down some near vertical slopes on our freshly waxed boards. Next on the agenda was Nazca, home to the World famous lines, the origin of which is still unknown.
Sadly the people of Peru were not as friendly as those we'd encountered in the Americas to date and had earned themselves the nickname "The Peruvietnamese", an homage to the morally-inept people we'd
Dune Buggy
Our mode of transport up the dunes met in SE Asia's former battleground. For some reason we ignored the Footprint on arrival in Nazca and ended up speaking to one of the touts, Christian, an effeminate young man who assured us that his father was one of the pilots and his uncle ran our hotel. Fortunately for us, Christian had two spaces to fill on his dad's plane the next day and so after a bit of bartering we signed up.
The next morning involved a painful two hour wait for our airline to fill the plane, amazing considering we'd filled it the night before...
I'm not sure how to sum up the flight over the lines. It was definitely exciting as the plane lurched left and then right to give us views of the lines and they were interesting to see, however the mystery over why they're there for some reason failed to add to my experience. Perhaps it was the nagging thought that they could have been created solely as a tourist attraction - why, when Machu Picchu was discovered in 1911 did it take a further 30 years for the lines to be found? Surely someone trekking in the nearby hills would
Boarding
And our method on the way down! have seen them and thought to mention it...
Some basic research on the Internet, mainly on the Lonely Planet's Thorntree Forum, provided us with the 2007 bus statistics. Unlike the UK these are not a measure of punctuality and customer services, in Peru they show numbers of accidents, injuries and deaths for each company. Next on the itinerary (so to speak) was Cuzco, home of the Inca empire and gringo capital of the World, due to it's buzzing nightlife and access to Machu Picchu. Method of travel to Cuzco? You guessed it, another night bus - this time with the much heralded
Cruz del Sur. Bolstered by our newfound knowledge that it's seats 1 & 2 who account for nearly every fatality, we booked some seats in the Cama section and prepared for a night of luxury. Sadly due to a combination of poor organisation on their part and poor Spanish on ours we got on the bus after the evening meal had been served and spent the next 14 hours hungry, but safe in our moving "lazy boy" chairs.
A couple of days in Cuzco for acclimatization and tour booking proved very welcome. We enjoyed walking around
Inca Cola
A very natural looking drink, with an equally natural tasting flavour the city, taking in the sites and stopping for a few hot chocolates in the Sun, we dined out on Alpaca stew and even went to the theatre, for a first class performance of a Peruvian legend,
Kusikay, that would not have looked out of place in the West End.
Over to Kate for the main event...
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