Nazca, Huacachina, Paracas

With the exception of Nazca, I knew virtually nothing about these places when I booked my bus trip with Peru Hop. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, the backpacker crowd knows where the fun is, and Peru Hop seems to cater almost exclusively to the younger set. With a few noted exceptions…

Originally I didn’t intend to stay in Nazca but I changed my mind last minute. Really happy that I did; the flight over the famous Nazca Lines was such a treat! The lines themselves are a  mystery although many believe they were drawn for the gods (they’re only fully visible from the air). The 14 that you see on the 30-minute flight are remarkably well preserved, being more than 2500 years old. I fear my own lines won’t hold up so well…

Huacachina’s claim to fame is that it is surrounded by sand dunes that you can climb, traverse by sand board or dune buggy or slide down. Once you’ve done any or all of these activities, the only thing left to do is drink. So drink they do. Huacachina is quite possibly the noisiest place I’ve ever been. Staying in a tent, the sound is amplified so that you just may want to slit your own throat by bedtime. Thankfully, the management is against mass suicide by the older crowd so they close the pool at 10 pm so as to avoid large teams of forensic investigators roaming the property and ruining the vibe.

Paracas was delightful. The 100 or so Peru Hoppers who showed up for the Ballestas Islands tour on my first morning there were sorely disappointed to find the tour cancelled due to rip tides. But safety comes first. Petra, a German woman who was also traveling solo, and I decided to explore the area on foot.

Petra was a bit of an enigma. She weighs about 90 pounds soaking wet, smokes like a chimney and would rather drink alcohol than eat. She is also a psychotherapist back in Germany, a picture I found hard to reconcile with the fireball who ignored the pleas of security guards to stop boulder-hopping at one point on our walk. But I digress…the walk was fabulous. We only turned around when we hit the nature reserve which is desert. At high noon, it was deadly hot and 10 kilometres was enough!

We toured the reserve in the afternoon aboard a bus. And the next morning, the sea had quieted down enough so that the Ballestas Islands tours were up and running again.

Finally, Petra and I hired a taxi to take us back to the nature reserve in the afternoon to see a couple of viewpoints that we didn’t see the day before. All in all, a great couple of days before my final stop in Peru, the massive city of Lima.