Miss Maps Goes Solo

13 hours from Cusco to Ica, or so we were told by the bus company. At 8pm, we piled on to the bus, it was definitely not a 1st class one. The locals tend to buy 2 tickets and fit a family of 4 into those seats. Throughout the bus (including next to me), children are squeezed into the gap by their parents feet. The boy next to me must´ve been 10 years old. He spent the entire journey there and didn´t moan once. At first we marvelled at this good behaviour then decided that it´s actually very sad. These kids don´t expect any kind of stimulation, they just sit and stare. Some of the luckier kids (and unlucky adults) lie in the isle.

At 3am the mot horrendous Peruvian music came blasting through the speakers at top volume. After 10 minutes of this Justine could take no more and hurdled over the sleeping people down to the drivers cab. Weirdly everyone thanked her on her way back but no-one else dared to ask him to switch it off.

17 hours after leaving Cusco (13 hours, yeah right) we arrived in Ica. A 2 minute taxi journey took us to the oasis town of Huacachina. I´ve never seen anything like it. A lagoon surrounded by palm trees and then enormous sand dunes on every side. The ton has a strange decrepit English sea-side town feel to it. Old grand hotels which are now abandoned and pedal boats out on the lagoon. Punch and Judy would´ve completed the scene.

People come here to go sandboarding and dune buggying, so we signed up. Thanks to Tish´s recommendation I knew the name of the craziest driver and so off we went with Chupong, tearing up and down the dunes, screaming the whole way. It´s kind of like being on a rollercoaster apart from you´re not attached to the tracks, brilliant.

Sand boarding was OK but I was hopeless at it and spent most of the time on my bum. Once I went down the slope sitting on the board but under estimated how long and steep the slope was. I was so scared I dug my heels in and apparently came down the hill like a giant sand ball. I couldn´t open my eye or mouth and had to fall off to one side to stop the horrific expeirence. I had a layer of sand all over me, here are the before and after photos:

We ended up spending 4 nights in Huacachina, way more than we originally intended, but we had a great chilled out few days next to the pool. There´s something disconcerting about being in the desert though. I feel like living between huge piles of sand is asking for trouble, surely the town will just be swallowed up one day.

From Huacachina we spent a few hours in Nazca. This is a dust ball town in the middle of nowhere which only got on to the tourist maps after a plane accidentally discovered the Nazca lines in the 1930s. These are huge pictures of animals drawn in the earth which can only be seen from above. No-one knows how they got there or why. That´s all cool enough but somehow didn´t really appeal to us, especially as the flight to see them is quite expensive. Nope, instead we decided to go and see some dead people. Spooky but really interesting, the cemetary in Nazca is pre-Inca, about 1200 years old. They´ve excavated a number of tombs containing really well preserved skeletons and other burial artifacts. It was really interesting to see a real Shaman in his tomb, although I felt a bit wrong to be looking at them and taking pictures. There were also babies which were horribly well preserved, I didn´t take any pictures of those.

Another overnight bus journey later and we´ve arrived in Arequipa, further south in Peru. It´s a beautiful town but after Cusco we feel a bit like we´ve had enough of this type of environment so we´re mainly here to go to Colca canyon, an enormous place with good hiking and traditional villages, should be cool.

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