South America (Part III)
Arequipa
While in Arequipa the thing to do is to try guinea pig. That is, eat it. It´s pretty well known that I am highly carnivorous and will eat just about any meat but I decided to give the old guinea pig a miss for 2 reasons: 1. It was ridiculously expensive, and 2. They just deep-fry the thing and I´m not keen on deep-fried anything (with the exception of potatoes). Others did try it though and from their reaction I think I made a good decision in sticking with the tried and true llama steak.

I didn´t do that much in Arequipa but I did take time out to visit Juanita the ice princess. Juanita is the name they gave to a perfectly preserved teenage girl from Inca times they found on a volcano near Arequipa in 1994 (or thereabouts - I forget when exactly). She had been sacrificed to the mountain god right at the top of the volcano and because it hadn´t erupted she´d been encased in ice since then until a volcano nearby starting erupting and melted the ice. It just happened that about 4 days after being loosed from the ice she was found by some mountain climbers so she didn´t get the opportunity to decompose. They have a little museum in Arequipa devoted to the story of Juanita and it´s pretty cool to go see. You even get to see the ice princess herself - she´s kept in a special display chamber there but is "rested" during low season.

Driving to Nazca

El Misti - volcano near Arequipa

The drive to Nazca is split over two days to give our driver a bit of a break. We stopped just outside of Arequipa to allow us to get some nice shots of El Misti - the volcano that looms over Arequipa. I was also pretty happy this day because I had bought myself another jar of nutella for the 2 drive days AND we´d managed to get some corn tortillas in Arequipa so I got a proper lunch instead of just having to eat the filling from the sandwich. Finding corn products in South America has been surprisingly difficult.

We stopped overnight in Puerta Inca which is a small beach place with nothing but a camp ground and hotel. We camped there overnight and enjoyed a raging bonfire thanks to one of the boys aquiring what we think may have been a piece of furniture. All evidence of it was gone by morning though. We drove from Puerta Inca to Nazca (home of the Nazca lines) via Chauchilla.

One of the Chauchilla skeletons

Chauchilla is an excavated cemetery and perhaps the most boring and pointless stop we´ve made. Basically they have dug up some tombs from the Nazca period and charge people stupid enough to stop S/. 5 to see the skeletons. They know absolutely nothing about them so the guided tour is pretty much "Here is tomb one. It has skeltons in it. You can still see hair. Here is tomb two. More skeletons. The bones are bleached by the sun. White is not the natural colour." Then they tell you that actually the skeletons weren´t found in the tombs and they put them there assuming that´s how they´d been buried but they might not have been. No one tipped the guide.

We arrived at Nazca to a really nice campground with a pool and everything. Did bugger all in that afternoon as we didn´t have our flights over the Nazca lines until the next morning.

Nazca
Our tour guide had been warning everyone how much the little planes moved around and told everyone not to eat brekky until after the flight. I was pretty excited about going on the flight since I love small planes and turbulence is what makes flying fun in my opinion. I don´t get motion sick so ate quite a big brekky before the 8am flight. Glad I did since we didn´t get to go until 10:30! No reason other than typical South American service. The flight was pretty good though overpriced and not nearly as turbulent as I would have liked (I had pictured rollercoaster style dips and banks but alas! it wasn´t to be). No one can really explain the existence of the lines and they are only visible from the air so the pan-american highway has been built directly through a couple of them. They have been so driven over that half the time you don´t see them until the pilot points it out and circles a few times. It is cool to see though and the lines are perfectly straight.

Huacachina

Huacachina from the dunes

We left Nazca after the flights and lunch and moved on to the oasis town of Huacachina. It´s a nice relaxing place. The only real attraction is a dune buggying and sandboarding trip. Dune buggying was a bit disappointing - not nearly as fun as expected. But sandboarding was really cool. One of the boys had a massive stack which I luckily caught on camera.

Adam stacking it sandboarding

He was a bit sore but not too badly hurt. Had a free afternoon which I elected to use to laze about by the pool rather than go to another bloody Inca museum in nearby Ica. It was a good day all in all.

Ballastas Islands and Lima

Ballastas Islands - lots of birds

Left early the next morning to drive to Lima and the end of the tour for 10 of the crew. We stopped on the way for a boat cruise out to the Ballastas Islands sometimes called the poor man´s Galapagos or the Peruvian Galapagos - wishful thinking I say. It had loads of sealions, Peruvian boobies, Peruvian pelicans, 4 types of cormorants, Humboldt penguins, Inca terns and of course seagulls. Hardly as awe inspiring as the Galapagos. With so many birds the smell of guano was pretty strong and some people got quite nauseous. It was an ok trip but could have been shorter - I mean, how many boobies do you need to see before you realise that the Peruvian variety look quite similar to seagulls (as orthonologists everywhere call for my head)?

From the Ballastas Islands stop it was 5 more hours to Lima the Peruvian capital. It´s a sprawling city of 8 million and not really my scene. I went for a wander up the pedestrian mall near our hotel anyway as the search for good chocolate is never ending and got so much verbal abuse and lewd remarks from the local men that I decided I wouldn´t walk around by myself here. I figured that if I walked with one of the boys I wouldn´t get as much attention. I was right. The next day I checked out a couple of churches and the Spanish Inquisition museum. The inquisition museum was pretty cool and a mural there shows that the fountain in the Plaza de Armas is the original from that time. Day 2 saw me visit the other side of town and the new tourist area of Miraflores. It wasn´t that exciting and I spent the afternoon sleeping in the hotel.

Riot police in Lima

Lima has loads of nice buildings but isn´t really a very nice place - the riot police have a really visible presence (especially near government buildings), I copped loads of vile comments, was even followed for a bit so had to go into a cafe to rid myself of the annoying man and one of our boys experienced an attempted mugging. Having said that, a few of the people on tour really liked it and had no problems whatsoever so it´s important to remember my extremely anti-city attitude to begin with.

Having left Lima we are now back at altitude in Huaraz; nestled between the Cordillera Blanco and the Cordillera Negro (the white and black mountains respectively). Hoping to do a glacier walk and ice-climbing here but it all depends on the weather which isn´t looking favourable.