Today we spent the day chilling out and exploring the local area we were in called Barranco. Then that evening we met a girl called claire in ourhostel who happened to be starting the same trip as us the next day! So the next day the three of us got a taxi to our starting hotel of our trip where we met some other people starting our tour. We all decided to share taxis and go into the centre of Lima to explore. We went to the main square and watched the changing of the guard and then we went to the San Fransico monastry and the catacombs which was really interesting. We then all went for a really long lunch and chatted and satrted to get to know each otehr and everyone seemed lovely! Eventually we headed back to the hotel ready for the meeting with our new tour leader Carolina and met everyone in our group. There was 16 of us altogether so a lot of new people to meet, although two of them were a couple of girls we knew from back home which was so random that we were all on the same tour!! We all went out for dinner and drinks together to start to get to know each other. The next day we had a lie in and then went shopping for snacks and went on the internet. Then at about 1pm we got our local bus to Pisco where when we arrived we had a tour of the town. We then had dinner in our hotel where 3 men came and played us some live traditional music whilst we were eating, it was great! The next morning we were up early to get a bus to the port so we could get a boat out to the Ballesta islands. We saw some amazing rock formations and at the islands themselves got to see sealions, penguins, starfish and many different types of birds and there were thousands of them it was rather impressive! Once we got back to the port we met the rest of the group that didn´t go and got our bus to the pisco distillery where we were shown how they make their pisco!...a very famous, very strong, local alcoholic drink! We also got to try many different types of pisco so by the end of it we were all feeling rather tipsy and it was only 1 in the afternoon...but now we were ready to go sandboarding!. Our next stop was the Huacachina desert and oasis which was beautiful. We all got into sand buggies and then were crazily driven across the sand dunes to 4 different spots where we could sandboard. A couple of the guys showed off and stood up on the boads going down but most of us were too scared so we just laid down on the board and let the guys push us and we flew down the dunes...it was amazing and so much fun, one of the best things we have done on our trip for sure! We were then taken back on the sand buggies which was like being on a rollercoaster and then went and had lunch. We then carried on driving to Nasca where we stopped at a viewing tower to see a couple of the Nasca lines from above which were quite impressive. We finally got to our hotel and had dinner and went to bed after a very long, full on day which was amazing!