Ola from Peru!

Well.....we have had a hectic few days. Arrived in Lima on Monday night after a very long plane journey. Our transfer to the hostel didn´t turn up (typical!) so we ended up getting a taxi from outside the airport. I have honestly never seen anything like the traffic in Lima, the sheer volume of cars and the amount of beeping horns was amazing. Anyway, we made it to the hostel in one piece which was in the Miraflores district of Lima. This is where all the Peruvian elite live so is much nicer than the center. After a good nights sleep we wandered out to see the sights. Got yet another scary taxi ride to Lima Central where we had a look around and booked our bus for the next day to head down the coast to Ica.

The bus journey to Ica was actually suprisingly ok. The buses here are really nice. Had a couple of traditionally dressed Peruvian women sitting behind us which was nice to see although one of them snored the whole way there! When we got to Ica we headed straight to Huacachina (think thats how you spell it). This place is literally in the middle of the dessert. It is a small village surrounded by sand dunes. The hostel was really nice and had a little beach hut and swimming pool in the centre, not that it was warm enough to be swimming, but we had a couple of drinks at the beach bar before heading to bed. Right....now you are all going to be shocked when I tell you the next part. The next day we went Sand Boarding. Now, I don´t think I really thought through how scary this was going to be before I signed up for it, hehe. Eight of us got in this dune buggy and went up into the dunes surrounding uacachina. There was another buggy on the same tour and the two drivers were in total competition with each other going massively fast and driving down the steepest sand dunes I have seen in my life! Adam has got a funny video of me on his camera looking absolutely terrified. I won´t let him embarass me by putting it on. We sand boarded down, what at this point looked like a very high sand dune, on our stomachs. It was actually really good fun but the more dunes we stopped at the higher they got until the last one where you couldn´t even see the bottom. I don´t know how but some how I managed to force myself to go down it. When I got to the bottom though another guy came down, fell off his board and really hurt himself. I think if this had happened first there would have been no way I was going down.

Today we got the bus to Nazca. We are going to fly over the lines tomorrow which should be good. If you havn´t heard of them google it....they are pretty impressive looking.

Hope all is well back home anyway. Missing you all.

Lauren xxx