Our next stop was the town of Pisco which had been devastated by a massive earthquake in 2007. Unfortunately it hasnt recovered yet with most of the town run down and attractive. Our reason for staying here was to visit the nearby Ballestas Islands, a wildlife haven known as the 'poor mans galapagos' and the Paracas National Reserve. The Ballestas Islands were fascinating and our tour very informative. As well as seeing a giant cactus shape (El Candelabra) carve...

Huacachina is a tiny village sat around a lake in the Peruvian desert south of Lima consisting of no more than 50 or so buildings. The majority of our time was spent sandboarding (basically snow boarding on sand dunes) which was great fun but extremely tiring as we had to walk up big sand dunes all day in the desert sun. We both got the hang of it after a couple of days and picked up many bruises along the way as well as each of us wiping out once (Ashley's was c...

Arriving in Nazca at 6am we decided to book up a plane tour over the Nazca lines for the same morning. The lines are a series of shapes and images (whale, monkey, 'owl man', condor, hummingbird, parrot and a dog to name a few)cut into the desert by the Nazca culture hundreds of years ago. Due to a mistake by the tour operator we were put on two different planes which was both annoying and a little unnerving for Ashley who has a fear of heights. The views of the l...

Our first day back in Cusco was spent relaxing and recovering from the inca trail. After a long lie in (8am was a late wake up compared to the last week!) we spent the morning relaxing and checking into a hostel before heading to an english pub with 2 of our trail friends to continue our recouperation with pies, tea and other english delights that had been sorely missed, and a 4 hour game of monopoly! The next day we decided to go quad biking in the afternoon acr...

On the Friday we flew to Cusco and met the remainder of our Inca trail group for another briefing session. We spent the day admiring Cusco's incredible Inca architecture and acclimitising to the high altitude (3300m). The next day we had our "practice trek" through an Inca site in the Sacred Valley, finding the altitude no problem until there was a sharp climb up steps which left most of the group exhausted! We also visited a small community where we sa...