Peru - Part 2, Mysteries of the desert & Canyon country

Claire & I arrived in Lima & met up with Leanne & Ruth (one of the Irish girls we met in Montanita) where we all jumped on a bus down the coast to a little desert oasis town called Huacachina. Leanne’s week of surf & Spanish lessons in Lima hadn’t exactly gone to plan, not managing to further her surf career unfortunately, though she did manage to get some 1 on 1 Spanish lessons - which consisted of meeting up with an overly tactile middle aged ‘teacher’ in McDonalds every day for a lesson & gourmet meal…the several nights of heavy drinking & partying that ensued were obviously a necessary antidote to the rather bizarre lessons.

Huacachina is a funny little place, literally a very small town built around the banks of a picturesque desert oasis - surrounded by huge towering sand dunes. The key attractions of this place are chilling out, partying, sand boarding & dune buggying. After a night of partying & a day chilling out, Claire & I decided to go on one of the dune buggying & sand boarding trips - Leanne & Ruth opting for the more chilling option until a few days later when they would give it a go as well. Most of the boards available are just basic pieces of wood , modified with a slippery base & straps for your feet or hands. A couple of places offer actual snowboards with boots & bindings, so Claire & I decided to upgrade & go for the snowboard option.

We set out at 4pm in the buggies for a 2 hour trip that would include a desert sunset. Within the first couple of minutes it became apparent that the dune buggy drivers are totally psychotic & our guy proceeded to drive this thing at full throttle over the huge expanse of desert & dunes - regularly taking flight as he launched us over the top of another dune. This was like something out of the film Mad Max - really good fun. We had several stops at the top of some of the largest dunes to board down them. Very similar to snowboarding in deep powder, as its all about keeping the nose of the board out of the sand. We had a real laugh launching ourselves down the dunes, even managing to incorporate a jump over the lip of one of the dunes down into another - great fun.

There are several common themes that are beginning to define elements of our Latin American experience - the first of which is the seeming inability of anyone to actually tune a radio in - every radio drifts in & out of reception & is full of static the entire time - even on the buses. Our first tip to Latin Americans to make life better for all concerned would be either learn how to tune a radio in or turn the damn thing off. The second common theme is the utter uselessness of all waiters & waitress’ in every single restaurant. Items ordered are regularly completely forgotten, they literally cook one dish at a time & bring it out one by one (even if it is multiple orders of the same dish) - meaning that you never actually eat together around the same table, everyone sits there watching each person take their turn of eating. The staff have also perfected the ability to avert their eyes from the entire restaurant the entire time, so it is impossible to get their attention without actually getting up & tapping them on the shoulder. The time that you regularly have to wait to receive your orders is ridiculous as well - something that pushed us to breaking point one night in Huacachina. We ordered our meals (after waiting over 30 mins for the waiter to come to our table) & it then took another hour & a half until the first dish came out - all the while Peruvian families are being served in record time & meals arriving together. So after consuming several beers & one meal between 4 of us, we got up & walked out, still waiting for 3 meals to arrive, without leaving any cash - appalled at the lack of service & motivation of the staff. Tip number 2 - the idea of running a business is to make money, in order to maximise your profits, learn the basics of your trade first & then try actually carrying them out!

Rant over.

Next we continued south through the Peruvian desert, a dramatic landscape originating from an antient sea bed, to the town of Nazca to checkout the mysterious Nazca Lines. The best way to view these giant ancient etchings in the desert is by air, so we chartered a small cessna plane and took to the sky. The Nazca lines consist of hundreds of perfectly straight lines in the sand at various angles as well as a variety of shapes or drawings of animals & symbols such as a spider, hummingbird and whale, all several hundred meters in size. No one actually knows what the meaning of it all is although there are a variety of theories ranging from the reasonably plausable to the utterly ridiculous (extra terrestrial landing directions being one of the the more ridiculous theories!) They are believed to date back some 700 years and were only really discovered about 50-60 years ago. The most believable explanation for the straight lines are they are indicators left for successive generations, of the water sources available in anotherwise desolate desert landscape.

This doesn´t offer any explantion to the animals & symbols drawn into the landscape however like the spider below:

Seeing them first hand is an unusual and fairly impressive sight, though you have to hold onto your stomach during the flight as the pilot flips and turns sharply to allow all passengers a good view! A french girl in front of us managed to fill a number of plastic bags with vomit whilst her boyfriend sat there with a complexion ranging from ghostly white to green and sweating profusely! Thankfully the flight only lasts 35 minutes by which time the rather unpleasant aroma that had developed in the plance and the constant flipping around had started to make me feel queasy as well....not helped by the ham and cheese toastie, 2 cups of coffee and slice of cake i had just eaten before boarding the plane, thinking we had over an hour until our flight!

Nazca is also home to the the worlds largest sand dune.... Cerro Blanco is over 2000m high which is the height of 2 Ben Nevis´s stacked on top of each other of just sand... impressive.

After a fleeting visit to Nazca, we jump back on a bus and headed back down the Pan American highway and headed further south through more rugged desert landscape for the next 8 hours until we reach the colonial city of Arequipa, otherwise known as ´el ciudad blanco´, the white city as a lot of the buildings are built using a white volcanic rock known as ´sillar´taken from the several volvanoes that surround the city. The most impressive of which is El Misti which is not only over 5000m but is the perfect conical shape generally associated with a volcano.

Arequipa is a beautiful city made up of spanish colonial and moorish style architecture and with a host of moroccan and turkish restaurants, has a completely different feel about it than any other Peruvian city we have visited. It is also a major tourist destination & a visit to Peru would not be complete without coming here and visiting the famous Colca Canyon and ´Juanita´, the ice princess. Juanita was a teenage girl offered as a sacrifice by the Incas to the mountain gods in cerca 1500ad. Her perfectly preserved body was found in the 1980´s after a minor erruption dislodged some rock and unveiled her body, sitting in the foetal position, adorned with all sorts of material offereings. Apparently this was a regular practice of the Incas who worshiped the earth, the sky and the mountains and sacrificed (usually) young girls to the volcanoes to appease their anger and prevent erruptions.

After a couple of days milling around Arequipa and enjoying the delights of some good food in nice restaurants, we sign up to one of the tours going to the Colca Canyon. The Colca Canyon is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in North Amercia and stretches for several miles along the Colca Valley, awash with inca terraces and inca burial sites which are still used by many indigenous communities today.

The main reason people make the 2 day trip is to travel to a specific point along the canyon where the Andean Condors take to skies in search of food. We stayed overnight in a small town called Chivay on route along the Colca Canyon, and woke very early (5am) for the bus ride to the view point. Bang on schedule between 8am and 9am, up to a dozen or so condors, some with a wingspan of up to 3m, start to leave their nests and soar on the canyon thermals for an hour or so before heading off in search of food. It's an impressive sight to see such huge birds, gliding so effortlessly only metres from you head.

Other highlights include seeing wild vicuna, domesticated alpaca and llama and many indiginous communities in an array of different colourful dress, descendants from Inca times and the different communities are still identified by the different types of hat they wear.