After spending some of the day wandering around Lima in a jet-lagged daze, it was time to meet the travelling companions for this part of the South America trip. There are fifteen of us, and apart from me they’re mostly Australian with a few English people and a couple of Canadians thrown in for good measure. Hello Emma, Sadie, Shawn, Jodie, James, Ruth, Damelza, Ronnie, Alijen, Aida, Eric, Kim, Michaela and Bec. Again, I’m the only lone male on this trip, so I get a single room by default. Life is tough sometimes.
Our leader for this part of the trip is a lady called Katy (pronounced “Catty”), and after the initial briefing some of us went for a few drinks. The local currency is the sol (plural: soles), although the US dollar is also used. After three months in Japan and Australia, beer is wonderfully cheap again. Actually going to a bar/restaurant is fraught with hassle, though, as representatives from each establishment try to lure you in with offers of free drinks. Once sitting outside with a beer, we were then pestered by a small child looking for change and a travelling percussionist who treated us to some thumping noises before pestering us for change.
People drive on the right in Peru, and it’s the first time I’ve had to look the wrong way before crossing the road since I was in Germany a couple of years ago. At least the driving is relatively sane, there’s a fair amount of honking and swerving and crazy manouevres but it’s not nearly as mad as Vietnam. Or France, for that matter. Our transport was a local bus to Pisco the following afternoon, which took about four hours. Katy warned us to keep our small backpacks on our laps, not in the overhead compartments or even under the seats. I was sitting next to her on the bus, and she told me that she had put her bag under her seat on one previous journey, and discovered that someone had somehow managed to crawl under the seat and slice the back of it, making off with money (although failing to dislodge her laptop).
Pisco is home to the Pisco sour, Peru’s national cocktail. Naturally these had to be tried that evening, although the fact that it takes about half an hour for them to be made is a natural limiter for how many one can drink. Not that there was much chance of that, with an early start for a visit to the Ballestas islands the next morning. The islands are inhabited by birds and sea lions, about 40 minutes from Pisco by speedboat. I was sitting right at the back, being gassed by fumes from the twin outboard motors, and wasn’t able to hear anything that Jesus said. Perhaps I should clarify that Jesus gave the running commentary from the front of the boat, although he’s a tiny man so I’m amazed he could see over the sides.
About a kilometre away from the main island, there was some relief from the engine fumes – they were drowned out by the smell of ammonia from all the guano. There are a lot of birds there, and they have yet to invent any form of sewerage system. Jesus explained what the different types were, in English and Spanish, but he was inaudible where I was sitting. There were plenty of Humbolt’s Penguins, along with various gulls, gannets, terns, skuas and sea lions.
By the late morning, we set off on a minibus to visit a Pisco distillery. It’s made with grapes, which used to be trampled into mush by foot, but is no longer prepared by this method because of the amount of foot sweat that ended up in it. Except, that is, for a festival once a year when it’s made by the traditional method. The cheerful bloke at the distillery explained the different parts of the process, then sat us down to sample the different types. Pisco itself is between 38% and 45% alcohol, and it is then sold in various different forms – the pseudo-Bailey’s proving most popular.
After consuming so much free alcohol on an empty stomach, we had lunch before going sand-boarding. I’ve done this before in New Zealand and Fiji, but neither of those involved a 15-minute white-knuckle ride across the dunes in a sand buggy. The coastal areas of Peru are incredibly barren, vast stretches of it are grey dust with no plant life to be seen. There is also a fair amount of sand, and plenty of options for tourists to go sliding down it on surf boards.
Nasca next, or Nazca – it seems to be spelled whichever way you like. On the way out to a pre-Inca cemetary in the desert, we saw Cerro Blanco rising above the mountains. It’s claimed to be the biggest sand dune in the world, at over 2000 metres high. Apparently you can go sandboarding down that too, although the walk up it wouldn’t be much fun. The cemetary itself has a bunch of submerged graves, which were discovered by gravediggers nearly 40 years ago. They took anything valuable, but left a lot of the mummies where they were. There are sun-bleached human bones and skulls littering the ground, and the dry atmosphere has preserved everything well.
The only way to see the famous Nazca lines is by air – light aircraft being a convenient method of transport. One of them apparently crashed recently, but they’ve tightened up their safety procedures since. There was a warning sign on the control panel of the Cessna 210-5 saying “No acrobatic measures, including spins, approved” – so that’s all right, then. There were four passengers (including me) and two pilots, one of whom told us what we could see below the wing. The plane banked over the famous lines so the people on one side could see them, before turning around and going back the other way. Some of the more travel-sickness-prone passengers didn’t cope too well with that.
The lines themselves are astonishing, although some of them don’t necessarily look much like what they’re supposed to. The fact that they were created by people who couldn’t see them is still puzzling, not least because of the picture of the “astronaut” on the side of a hill. Some people hold them to be ancient runways for spaceships, although surely if alien civilisations could travel the vast distances of interstellar space then they’d be able to find a parking space without having to navigate by pictures on the ground – especially since they’re mostly animals, rather than helpful directions to the nearest service station.
After the local bus and minibus, expectations weren’t high for the night bus to Arequipa. To our delight, it turned out to be pretty luxurious double-decker (with free wi-fi – although it didn’t work for long), and most of us managed to get some sleep despite what seemed to be excessively fast cornering by the driver. The road itself, although invisible through the curtains and in the darkness, had a rocky cliff face on one side and a sheer drop on the other. While half-asleep, I could feel my ears popping as we climbed.
At 3am, there was a hefty crunch, and the bus continued for a short distance before stopping. While turning a corner too fast, the top of the right hand side had scraped against a rock, which shattered most of the windows. Thankfully nobody was injured, although we were stopped in an unsafe area so had to continue for another 15 minutes or so while the remains of the windows disintegrated onto the seats. Upon reaching a layby, we all piled out of the bus while the next step was decided upon. Since a replacement bus would be hard to come by in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, the driver and his assistant poked out the last bits of shattered glass and we all then piled back on to continue the journey. It did get a little colder after that, but it wasn’t as stuffy, and the driver took the corners at more sensible speeds.
By 7am we had changed buses for the final part of the journey, and arrived in Arequipa needing sleep. The next day we had a coach trip to Chivay, passing through the mountains and stopping at a pass at 4910m (the highest point I trekked to in Nepal was just over 4000m). To combat altitude sickness, it’s recommended to chew coca leaves. No idea if they work, but the coca candies were altogether nicer. There was plenty of fluffy wildlife on display – llamas, alpacas and vicunas. They are all insanely cute. And, as I discovered at lunch time, alpacas are also very tasty. I also tried the guinea pig, but it was pretty awful. Apparently Cusco is the best place to eat guinea pig, because they’re grilled rather than fried. I might still give it a miss.
The locals have cottoned on to the fact that tourists all ooooh and aaaah at alpacas, and young girls in traditional dress walk around with baby alpacas to pose for photos. Katy strongly urged us not to give money for this, but to give them crackers or some non-sweet food instead. One girl of about 5 or 6 took her alpaca up to the bus, but those of us who were there didn’t have anything to give her. Her name was Norma. James asked her in Spanish what her alpaca’s name was. “Harry Potter”, came the reply.
There was a short walk up a nearby hill in the afternoon, to see more tombs (and human bones lying around) before a trip to the nearby hot spring baths. They weren’t massively hot, but it was big enough to swim in and you could order a drink from the pool, so I wasn’t complaining.
There was some traditional music and dancing at the restaurant later on, as I ate one of Harry Potter’s friends in pepper sauce. The first dance (accompanied by a Peruvian band with bass guitar, drums, ukelele-type-thing and pan pipes) was strangely reminiscent of Scottish country dancing. This odd familiarity was destroyed by the next dance, which involved the bloke grimacing under a two-foot-high hat decorated with metal plates with coins on strings bashing against them, while the woman had a life-size plastic baby doll strapped to her back.
Colca Canyon was the following morning’s amusement, which is claimed to be the deepest canyon in the world. It’s more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, which (as I discovered at King’s Canyon) isn’t actually a canyon at all, it’s a gorge. Still paying attention at the back? There will be an exam later. After a short walk along the edge, we arrived at a viewpoint to look out for Andean condors. Four condors obliged by soaring up the canyon on thermals, and with a wingspan of around (or more than) three metres they are difficult to mistake for anything else.
Hopefully everyone should be acclimatised to the altitude now, in preparation for the Inca trail. We may need to stock up on coca sweeties though.
