I had a sleepless night on the bus from Nasca to Arequipa and when I arrived in the city I immediately ran around trying to organise a cycling excursion on the Chachani mountain, which had been highly recommended to me. Once that was booked in for the afternoon I went to see the pretty Santa Catalina monastery - it is a beautiful complex of brightly-painted old convent buildings and collections of related art and artefacts (it was rather over-hyped by the guide b...

I spent two days in the Colca Valley, a very picturesque region of Peru. Our local guide for those couple of days, Luis Angel, was a total legend. I don't think he stopped talking for the entire time that we were on the bus, telling us things about the area, about Peru generally and random stories about his life as well as asking us questions about why we were there and what we liked most about his country - he was amazing and very comical! He had taught himsel...

Nasca is famous for the Nasca Lines - large lines, shapes and drawings carved into the desert between 900BC and 600AD that only make sense when seen from high up in the air. There are many theories but no consensus on how and why they came to be there. Apparently Nasca has only three minutes of rain a year and they must have had all of it just as I arrived because the road leading into the town was completely flooded. I got off the bus for five minutes to climb ...

On the way from Pisco to Nasca we stopped for a few hours at Huacachina where there is an oasis in the desert and also an artifical oasis which is a tourist resort. We went out into the sand dunes in dune buggies - basically wire cages on wheels. Once up there we did some sand boarding. I was actually not bad at it this time - I wasn't great at my first attempt in Namibia, this time wasn't as professional a set-up but it was so nice to have the buggy to drive us...

On the road from Lima to Pisco we passed the colourful but deprived shantytowns on the edge of Lima, a lot of derelict buildings and villages along the coast and some huge chicken coops. Pisco was hit by a massive earthquake in 2007 and 80% of buildings in the town were destroyed. Since then there have been protests and strikes as money that the government promised to rebuild the town either hasn't materialised or has been pocketed by corrupt officials. Around ...