Sand in your crack
Friday, July 14th, 2006
Ica desert courtesy of Anaisanais on Flickr
Finally dragged myself out of Arequipa and headed north to a small place near the city of Ica called Huacachina, an oasis in the desert. This small place is located around a small lake, surrounded by large sand dunes, a landscape straight out of the old Turkish Delight adverts. Hostel Rocha, with its pool, bar and family of parrots in the garden was the perfect place to chill out after the excesses of city life over the previous weeks.
View of Huacachina from the dunes
The main attraction in town is to take a dune buggy ride out into the desert where they drive like maniacs and throw you down the sand dunes on sandboards, getting sand in your mouth (amonst other places) has never been so much fun.
A couple days later, after a day by the pool soaking up some much needed sun, I headed down to Nazca for the day, a 2 hour bus ride south. Whilst the town itself might be a shit-hole, the surrounding desert has been keeping secrets from it for hundreds of years. The Nazca people inhabited this area before the Incas dominated Peru, and their people drew massive line drawings in the desert depicting animals, birds, people etc. Walking through this desert landscape you wouldn´t see these line drawings as they´re so big, but taking a small Cesna plane up into the air over it revealed them to us, and what a strange phenomena they are. Why these patterns were drawn is a point of much debate, which you can read more about on Wikipedia (worth checking the photos at least), but whatever you think there is no doubt that they are quite a spectacle.
Dave commented he wanted more monkey photos so here you go (courtesy of Karin Evelyn on Flickr)
The experience was all the better for being upfront in the co-pilots seat trying to resist the urge to push random buttons, if only the other people on our flight knew how strong that urge was for me, potentially sending them into an early grave just because I was having a Dougal moment.
We went to an old Nazca cemetary in the afternoon to see where they buried their dead in family group graves. When you look down into these pits you find mummies looking back up at you with dreadlocks twice the length of your average Rasta – a morbid excursion but strangley fascinating.
Oh how we laughed (courtesy of Fengrir on Flickr)
I jumped on a bus back to Huacachina (only for it to break down) and eventually arrived back to tranquillity for a few more days of sunbathing and very little else, a great way to relax, unwind and prepare myself for hitting the big dirty capital that is Lima, where I´m currently residing and considering taking another weeks work in the hostel bar before I dive north for Ecuador.
Ed