Deepest Darkest Peru

Ancient ruins, Outside Lima, Peru
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Well, after the Spanish crash course on the plane (not the best phrase perhaps) we arrived in Santiago, the capital of Chile and safely negotiated a luggage carousel pile-up, a safe ATM withdrawal and took a taxi 20km to the hostel in the dark without paying 3 times the usual price. All this without having to speak a word of Spanish. This was going to be easier than I had feared.

We arrived at the Hostel Andes at about 9.30pm and walked around the corner to get a snack from a cafe. We instantly regretted the decision to "take away" as we were pursued up and down the street by a wolf-looking dog who was hungrily eyeing up our food - or maybe our ankles. After a few laps of the street (dog still in tow - I had yet to learn the Spanish for "Bugger Off") we dived into an internet cafe for safety and to allow our fear-induced indigestion to subside.

We devoured quite a few drinks and a plate of chips, which we later discovered were actually fried tree roots!

Mummy! National Museum, Lima
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Hostel Andes is a really nice hostel, but we found the noise to be unbelievably bad both nights we stayed there and hardly slept at all. There is a whole night culture in Santiago which is based around the rubbish on the corner outside. First of all the rubbish is noisily dumped out onto the street. Then the street kids come around and tear it apart looking for cans and bottles for recycling - very commendable from an environmental perspective but not when they spend an hour stamping on the cans outside your room at 1am. Hot on the heels of the stampers are the rubbish trucks with pneumatic lifts which seem to cruise the area making a racket until about 3am. The jet-lag of being in 4 different time zones in 5 days definitely didn´t help, but at one point I was checking my phrasebook for the term "abatement notice".

Boobies! Ballestas Islands, Peru
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We spent a day looking around Santiago, which is probably about enough. There are a few nice buildings and the best bit is definitely the castle on top of the hill which gives panoramic views of the city and surrounding mountains. We weren´t too impressed by the range of food and a 2 hour hunt for a nice restaurant ended in us giving up and devouring a bad pizza from Pizza Hut. The cafe culture is alive and well, although on an evening everyone just seems to eat ice-cream and pizza. It was surprisingly hot though - we didn´t expect 30 degrees.

Making friends with Marvin the monkey, Casa de Arena II, Huacachina
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From Santiago we headed up to Lima - also about 30 degrees. We stayed at Miraflores House in the Miraflores, the nicest area of Lima. We took a day trip with the hostel owner, Francis (an absolute legend)and a few others, visiting the ancient ruins of Pachacamac, the even more ancient ruins at (I think) Cieneguilla, destroyed 600 B.C by landslide. There was evidence of human remains lying around at both of these sites - the odd bit of human hair or a part of a child´s skull. Eerie! We also had a look around an amazing church and San Franciscan monestary in downtown Lima where in the catacombs there were literally thousands of human bones laid out in various patterns. Looking down at a 5m deep well which is full of human skulls is quite an experience.

Huacachina - now that is what an oasis is supposed to look like.
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During our stay Francis also took a group of us out for a quiet drink which ended at a music club where an amazing Peruvian Gunz n Roses tribute band were playing until 2am. We devoured quite a few drinks and a plate of chips, which we later discovered were actually fried tree roots! I´m not sure if it was that, the drinks, or the Chinese food earlier that day but we had our first bout of dodgy guts the next day...and the next. Welcome to South America.

From Lima we headed down to Paracas, a national park which I was expecting to be an oasis of green. Not quite! Like Lima and all of the surrounding area it is a just coastal desert. We took a day trip out to the Ballestas Islands and checked out the pelicans, boobies (no typo), gulls and penguins which between them produce an amazing amount of guano (poo) which is collected and used as a valuable fertiliser. I´m not queuing up for the collection job - the islands absolutely reek of the stuff.

Moments later, the mangy dog behind Naomi at the top of the photo chased us back down the hill. Oh how we ran!
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We also took a personal tour of the national park where we got to travel around the coast looking at lots more sand and yet more birds. Our guide spoke English as well as I spoke Spanish so we learned a lot. He also brought along his brother who looked about 14 and let him have a go at driving the car when we were out of sight of the Park authorities. I think we´ll take the guided bus tour next time.

From Paracas we headed to Ica and then took a short taxi ride to Huacachina, which is literally an oasis in the middle of the desert (see photos). We spent a few days there relaxing and I went on a dune buggy trip (far better than any rollercoaster I´ve been on) around the dunes and got to go sandboarding down some scarily steep dunes. The boards we were using were attached to our feet with nothing more than thin velcro straps which gave two options for getting down the slope: 1) on your backside (not very cool); and 2) very very fast in a straight line. I had a degree of success with Option 2 and felt proud to come away with just heavy bruising to my tailbone and a few scrages.

We´re now in Arequipa, having decided to skip out Nazca on the basis that there was no way I was going to get Naomi to go up in a tiny plane to see the famous "Nazca Lines" drawn into the landscape and we´ve seen stacks of info on them already. We´re off to see Colca Canyon in a couple of days before heading down to Lake Titicaca and then Cuzco for Macchu Pichu. Only 5 weeks to go!