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Published: September 12th 2011
Soo it´s truly started! We´ve rolled down a Peruvian highway, had some Pisco sours, seen some penguins and bumped across the desert in a sand buggy! Now i´m supposed to tell you how we were squeezed into the corner of a bus full of drug barons, fought of ten of them to reclaim our bags and then walked 20 miles across a desert until we found the lagoon we´re now in. Equally, the sours should of given us food poisoning, the penguins turned out to be partial to man flesh and the buggy have disintegrated whilst the driver tried to jump over his mate´s car. Thankfully, we´re just not that interesting!
The trip started with the low budget backpackers option of a night in Heathrow. In order to hold interest, we decided to camp out in terminal 3 instead of 4 where we were leaving from. A 24hr Costa provided the only seating and lots of grotty looking people (including ourselves). A transfer, short flight to Paris and sprint across the airport then all set us up for our 12hr flight. 26hrs from setting off and we were watching the Andes poke out of the clouds as we descended towards Lima.
Both of us had somewhat written off Lima as a dirty, dangerous, uninteresting city. Dirty air it certainly had, as ancient cars drove madly around the streets with 5 cars filling 3 lanes and motorbikes using the pavements as a shortcut. Other than that, our presumptions seemed wrong. The area we stayed in had a somewhat American feel (Miraflores... admittedly the poshest bit) and we had great time at a Peruvian food festival called Mistura. A huge park area was cordoned off and there were hundreds of stalls serving various foods. We felt like we were mingling with locals until we got put in the ´zonas de turistico´.
Onto Paracas on our swanky tourist bus with a dog film that made everyone on the bus cry. The trip to the Ballestas Islands provided us with sites of penguins, pelicans and sea lions. Plus people harvesting the guano (bird poo) as fertiliser! We also saw the Candilabero... a huge symbol in the desert. Apparently it´s ´850m... that´s big... it means it was probably quite important.´!
We´re are now in Huacachina, a tourists playground next to a desert lagoon. Sand-buggying and boarding and a desert sunset made for a fantastic time last night. Today we chill in hammocks, eat banana pancakes and possibly do some more sand boarding. Life is hard guys.
Next stop Nazca!
Chow para a hora mi amigos!
Peter
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Claire
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Great intro there Peter I was hooked! Sounds mega fun, hope it continues to be so :-)