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We are off on our big adventure
Hola!
We hope that you`re OK and surviving the gales and floods that we´ve heard about. After the tiring and amazing Inca Trail, we had 1 day to chill out in Cuzco, then got on an overnight bus to Nazca, which is on the West coast of Peru. We had planned to stay for a few days but Nazca town turned out to be pretty rubbish. The only redeeming feature is the Nazca lines, which have to be seen to be understood, but we´ll try to explain them. The lines are a series of animal figures, shapes and lines that were created by clearing away the top layer of the sand and stone in the desert. The lines are up to 15km long and are completely straight, whereas the shapes and animals consist of just one continuous line. The Nazca lines are one of South America´s greatest mysteries because they are over 2000 years old (pre-Incan) and even now, people don`t understand how or why they were created.
Instead of staying in Nazca, we travelled to a tiny place called Huacachina which is a beautiful oasis surrounded by enormous sand dunes. We went sandboarding which wasn`t as good as last time because the boards were rubbish. But we also went dune buggying, which was brilliant and loads of fun. Apart from that, we mainly chilled by the pool at our hostel with some new friends; Dave and Rachel, the most hilarious lawyers you´ll ever meet, and Dr Peter, a Danish guy who was freakishly intelligent, did his physics PhD in "lasers" and had the best laugh ever.
Moving on from Huacachina, we caught an overnight bus to Puno, which is on one side of Lake Titicaca with Bolivia being on the other. We had a fairly major incident on the bus on our way which taught us a valuable lesson, toilets on buses in Peru are only for peeing, anything else could cause any or all of the following:
- dirty looks
- verbal abuse in Spanish
- potential mob lynching
- being thrown off the bus
From Puno, we crossed to Copacabana on the Bolivian side of the lake. This is the original Copacabana and a very important religious site for Bolivians. We climbed a hill that overlooks the town that`s apparently a sacred place with the stations of the cross up it, but were disappointed by all the rubbish and graffiti.
We caught a boat across to Isla del Sol, an island in the middle of Lake Titicaca. We merrily set off the walk to the other end of the island (4 miles ish) believing that we`d be able to get a boat back. This turned out only to be possible is we paid 20 pounds for a private speed boat, so we decided to trek all the way back. 8 miles doesn´t sound like a lot, but bear in mind that we were at 4000+ metres above sea level, it was about 30·C and the path constantly went up and downhill...!
We got to La Paz next and are interested to see what it will be like. Sorry for such a long email, there`s just so much that we want to share with you and even this is only a glimpse of our adventures. We`ve not been able to upload any pictures for a while because of dodgy computers. Hopefully we should be able to upload them straight after this email though, so check them out.
We`re sure you`re getting ready for Christmas by now. We`ve not heard any Christmas music so far, which is actually quite nice! We look forward to hearing your news.
Much love,
Clare & Nicky
xxxx
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