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Roadblocks successfully avoided and into Pisco for around 7 in the morning. Just enough time for a much needed coffee at what would have been our hotel for last night before getting on a boat to the Ballestas Islands. These have been described as Peru's Galapagos islands, but that doesn't really do justice to the sheer number of pelicans, Humboldt penguins, Peruvian boobies and other birds here (the guide reckoned any single visitor could expect to see around a million individual creatures). There are no turtles, but there are sea lions and dolphins instead, and at least they actually do something more than just floating.
Further south we came to Huacachina, a town built around an oasis in the middle of the Ica desert. So far as tourist activities go, the main attracftion here is to get into a motorised cage on wheels and go careering at high speed across the dunes in search of the best place to attach oneself to a board and slide down the sides of the dunes. Apparently it's taken very seriously (one of the locals was actually waxing his board before each run to gain additional distance).
In the evening we carried on to Nazca, with a stop on the way for a taster of the Nazca lines from a shaky steel tower (entrance free on account of the guard having gone home early). You can actually get a pretty good view of a couple of the lines from here, although you can also see just how much damage has been done by building major through roads straight over them. On our second day here we were able to take in the full display from the air before driving into the desert to Chauchilla, an archaeological site containing tombs of pre-Inca civilisations. The site is littered with random bones and pieces of pottery scattered by looters searching for valuables buried with their owners, whose graves were only a few feet below the surface. Fortunately, of the tombs that have been excavated, most at least retain the mummified remains of their occupants, eerily well-preserved to the point of being creepy. As well 1500-year-old skin and bones, you can still see the colours of the robes they were buried in, and even the hairstyles of the day. Also of note out here are the regular twisters caused by warm winds coming off the sea meeting with the cooler air of the Andes.
Back in town, we visited a pottery workshop which uses traditional pre-Incan methods for making clay goods, the main result of which is that all the colours are derived from naturally occurring sources and exclude the colour blue. A quick stop for lunch (for those of you who like the complete version of evenrts, it was chicken escabeche and a glass of chicha, a soft drink made from purple corn, of all things) then back to the hotel to chill out by the pool.
In hindsight, the hotel in Nazca was probably not the most salubrious place in the world. It's not so much the occassional roach as the ex-scorpion lying on the path outside the rooms that sort of drags the image down a bit. Maybe it's to counterbalance the fact that this place was the first we have been to that has its own pool.
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