Pottering around Peru

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H:

So it's been a month of holidaying now and I seem to think we have quite gotten the hang of this. A couple of travelling lessons, three very long bus rides, some grazed arms and alpaca wool paraphernalia, we have seen and done a lot more than we even imagined when we set off! We are in Peru now where everyone is so sweet and helpful, the women are short and colourful in their pretty skirts.

So picking up from Joe's update in Loja we sat in a dimly lit garden restaurant for hours waiting for the bus. A game of chess, a few beers and a dirty old hamburger later it was to the bus stop and on our way to Peru! Goodbye to Ecuador, the best start to our little adventure. The 8 hour bus trip through the night was not the best however. We went cold to boiling hot, no working windows, were subjected to blearing power ballads and dead ipods. Squashed and bothered we survived but all quite sellshocked at then end and I a little bit worried about the next many long bus trips we had to look forward to.

Our introduction to Peru was small town Piura at the top, the guidebook warned us that there wasn't much to do in this dusty place but weren't worried as it was just a one nighter on route to Lima. Having had to book our Inca trek 6 weeks in advance we were making our way to Cusco, the start of the trek, for a few days before to acclimatise to the high altitude again which also meant we had to be slightly organised as to how fast we were moving through the country. Many times we caught ourselves saying we wish we could have a little bit longer in a place... but I suppose it's always nice to leave wanting more. We wandered down the road from our hostel in the dizzy heat of the Peruvian sun, bones feeling quite hot, and sauntered into a roadside joint for lunch that was heaving with locals. Yummy, and quite importantly cheap, rice and bean almuerzos were delicious and we were very happy to not have to stoop as low as any of the horrible fried chicken stops which haunt every sleepy town we have been in so far. Lunches looking on the up, we sat in another Plaza de Armas which looked liked many others we had sat in and ate our beans while children ran around us playing a squealing with leftover halloween delight that we had missed on our bus ride.

Refuled and learning to move more slowly in the heat we prepared for our 15 hours to Lima. My worries ran away as soon as we saw our magical Cruz del Sur bus! Oh it was a really very magical air conditioned, double decker thing with pillows and blankets and GPS to make sure we don't get hijacked - I think. Pretty much the most luxurious thing we had set eyes on since leaving the lovely Premiere Inn at Heathrow. Hehe. So we arrived in Lima spritely and happy and ready to sit at our new hostel's rooftop bar celebrating into the evening our beautiful bus ride. Lima is mucho grande and has the city atmosphere we are used to. We stayed in Miraflores, the more upmarket part of town where all the fast cars and beautiful clifftop appartments live. Thinking it would be quite fun to jump off these rocky cliffs in Lima we decided to go paragliding. With a little green landing strip perched on the cliff and and Lima's skyscrapers as backdrop Joe bravely went first and much unlike his description of his parachute jump and it's safety checklist, they buckled him in in two clips and Mariano (the professional), cliped in behind, told him to run, not jump off the edge. That was it. Before I could blink Joe was up high in the sky over the sea. I was quite amazed how the various 20 other paragliders didn't all crash into one another. When Joe was grounded again with a grin I felt a little more confident so I took to the landing strip to be clipped in and we were soaring past the shoppers in the 10 storey LarcoMar and their surprised looks. It was a lot slower up in the air than it looks from the ground.

Feeling like we were in need of some culture after jumping off cliffs we took ourselves away from the pretty and clean Miraflores into central Lima, perhaps the more real Lima. The San Fransico church was old and covered in pigeons and we wandered in to see the famous catacombes which create a maze under the streets. Impressively the ancient Last Supper painting on the church wall showed the more traditional Peruvian fayre of a roasted guinea pig as the centrepiece for dinner. The catacombes are where the remains of some 25,000 former Lima residents are buried. Becuase of the vast number of people buried there the bodies were stored in rooms until they were just bones at which point they were somewhat unceremoniously thrown down a 10 metre well. More recent attempts to organise the remains means we walked through rooms of femurs, then rooms of skulls... very creepy. The monks who worked at the church, along with important city residents and benfactors to the church have the privilege of their own crypt. Since JP Morgan had sponsored a recent restoration of the church Joe wondered if this would make them a benefactor and provide them with their own corporate crypt to entertain clients for eternity?

In contrast to Lima our next stop on the Peru route to Cusco was Huacachina, a desert oasis with a total population of 115! So a tenny tiny town. So pituresque, the town centres around a small lagoon, framed with palm trees, dinky cafes and massive sand dunes as far as the eye can see. It is also a tourist trap for the adventure sports seeker and people who like to party into the night. We rowed romatically on the lagoon, then climed a sand dune and watched the sun set, lay in the sun by the pool and somehow Joe sneaking in some hours of rugby watching. He seems to have this sixth sense of when a game is playing and where he will be able to find it. Hmm. Our hostel surprised us on the first night, we came home to bed after a little bar hopping as you do on holiday, but could hear rather obscene salsa pop music coming from somewhere at the back. Past the pool we followed the noise, literally up the garden path to a very alive discoteque offering jugs of pisco sours. I really don't know how we had missed this earlier! In the small hours we made plans with some like-minded hostelers to go on the famous dune buggy and sand boarding tour the next day.

Bleary eyed we sat out the front waiting for the beastly oversized go-karts we had seen from a distace racing on the dunes to come and pick us up the next morning with new found bleary eyed friends. They arrived like bulldozers, and we all jumped in to head up the sandy mountains. Lulling us into a false sense of security they took off quite slowly until... we reached the top of a very large sand dune. We were perched precariously on the top and then it started, we took off down the other side, which felt like a near vertical drop at top speed. Tummies lurched, I was glad we had missed breakfast that morning. The only thing I can liken it to was an out of control roller coaster however I just hoped that the driver did actually have some control!! The boys loved it! I survived it, ok it was a lot of fun I suppose but once was enough for me. Once we were far enough out not to be run over by the other buggies it was time to take to the slopes with the boards. The sand dunes seem so much higher and scarier than the begginer slopes of the snowy mountains I have snowboarded down and a little daunting but after the initial apprehension and an unexpected push from the instructor I got the hang of it. Face first, tummy on board felt the saftest. Again, a slight false sense of security here. We were taken to about seven different dunes and went tummy or feet on boards down to the bottoms. Our last sand dune was the biggest and where we learnt that tummies does not necesarily mean safer. I went before Joe and dug my toes into the sand to take some of the speedy edge off, yus I am chicken. Joe next and he went down with the opposite approach, not chicken, speeding down the dune he got caught in the trail my board had left and realised he was heading staight for me. I was still perched on my board totally unaware I was in for a head on collision and sound doesn't travel that well in the desert so I didn't the hear the screams from Joe or from the people at the top of the sand dune who could see what was about to happen. Joe threw his arms out in an attempt to veer off course and got them stuck under his board. When he came up from his tumble there was quite a grazed armed boy left. Those poor arms looked quite sore! Joe seeminly unaffected by the sand(paper) grazes down his arms was happy that at least this happened on the last slope and he got toasted heorically into the night at the discoteque. It's all very dramatic on the slopes of Huacachina. I am terrbile at keeping this short... oh dear Mum I might even be taking after you and your emails that turn to novels!

We nursed Joe back to healing health with some antiseptic and were on the road again to the small plane airport in Nasca. Ours was a 6 seater plane and this was almost as exciting as the thought of seeing the old and wonderours Nasca Lines. We were told that we were 150 metres from the ground as we flew over the flat rock terrain around Nasca, and this seemed quite close enough to the ground. As we bounced and bumped our way over the lines we leant that they are quite simply made from moving aside the dark rock on top to show thew lightened rock below, but being so old and becuase no one really knows why they were put there in the first place they are really quite incredible. What is the meaning behind a dog, astornaut, wiggly old tree and monkey lines in the earth I wonder? The ancient Incan people decided not to explain themselves so well this time but something we feel quite lucky we got to see.

We made it to Cusco, where we are now after another 15 hour bus later, but it being all ok as the magical Cruz del Sur picked us up again... Feeling somewhat acclimatised now, our trek is tomorrow!! We have talked to people in the hostel who have just come back saying it was the most amazing time and excited we are. One couple did try and prepare us for rain as on their first day got sopping wet and had mouldy socks by the end of it - ick! Joe and I have hired lovely old trekking boots as were slightly underprepared and now a little over budget. I really am doing a lot of things I thought I would never do. Used shoes oh god. We climbed a hill on our first Cusco day, a little bit of practise we thought and horseriding yesterday which we so much fun under the Andean sun (oh I rhyme) plodding up and down mountains on horseback. So I am off to pack my trekkers bag now.

Wish us luck!

xx

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