Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Here we are in sunny Nazca. Or we could be, if it was daylight.
The flight over was reasonable as far as I was concerned, but Damian didn´t sleep and found it long and boring. We had planned a small diversion walking around Santiago during our 8hr stopover, but the exhorbitant visa fee put us off and we ended up having a kip in the airline lounge which was a much better investment.
We met up with our tour group on what was officially Day 2 of the trip. We thought we´d just make Day 1 but arrived at the hotel at 12.05am. Day 2 consisted of a wander around Lima, including a meal at a vegetarian restaurant that unaccountably had large numbers of meat-based dishes - until we discovered that it was all soy meat.
The first real goup activity was catching the bus to Pisco. That started with one of the group's bags being stolen at the bus station and lots of running around, checking security tapes and searching buses. An interesting beginning, but fortunately for us, it wasn´t our bag, and there were other buses to Pisco so we arrived a couple of hours behind schedule.
Pisco was unexpected. It turns out that it was the site of the earthquake last year where 1500 out of 5000 people died. It looks like the remnants of a war zone. At least half the houses are demolished or replaced by temporary housing. Apparently this is a lesson to hire proper builders and not try the do-it-yourself-adobe route. The UN had quite a visible presence to assist with the reconstruction. They also have an apparently famous cocktail called a Pisco Sour that was quite like a margherita.
This morning we had an early start and a cruise to the Ballestas Islands which also got our bird lists (if we had them) off to a flying start. In addition to the penguins, cormoroants, pelicans and shearwaters, we also saw sea lions and a couple of dolphins. For the invertebrately-inclined, there were also spider crabs, sea stars and anenomes.
Next stop was a pisco winery where we saw the traditional method of making the spirit that goes into the cocktail, an opportunity to play in sand buggies that we both passed on and then the drive to Nazca. We saw a couple of the smaller drawings, but are going tomorrow morning to see the bigger lines. So far, there has been hands, a tree and the foot of a lizard that unfortunately became roadkill on the Panamerican Hwy. Apparently a detour was too much to ask for.
The food has mostly been good and the beers have been cold so far. All we have to ask for is a small adjustment in our body clocks so we stop waking up in the small hours of the morning. Tomorrow is the flight over the Nazca lines, the cemetary (which may or may not have featured in the latest Indiana Jones installment) and then the overnight bus to Arequipa.
Adios amigos.
- comments