I´ve visited Lima before - concrete, polluted, and a bad cold I remember well, so I resolved to get in and out quickly.  A mad 20 minute herbie taxi -dash between the spaces left by other cars ensured we caught up with a just-departed north-bound bus to Huaraz in the beautiful Cordillera Blanca, 8 hrs away. On arrival, it wasn´t straightforward to find somewhere to stay - in the dark, no street names as the city had been flattened by earthquakes 3 times since 1940, me carrying about 30kgs as I now have all my camping and cold weather gear, hadn´t eaten all day with a dodgy stomach; and Inge balancing a contact lens on her tongue as she´d got grit in her eye and had nowhere else to store it... One good venue amongst the concrete was a Blackburner´s restaurant.  He´d travelled 30000kms on a 650cc bike before settling in Peru with a local chica.  The walls were replete with flyers of Kyber Pass and Akhash fine cuisine from our own Whalley Range; I sampled one of his curries to reminisce.  

Escaping to the high country, we completed a 3 day circuit, cresting at 4700m around snowy peaks.  Would´ve been fantastic had I not a) argued with my travel companion b) lost my whole MP3 music collection, painstakingly compiled before my departure a year earlier, due to the cold c) left my favourite engraved penknife on a rock and d) endured probably the worst return bus ride of my life, dropping 1500m around 30 hairpin bend at 40mph, then in a 2hr dust cloud as the driver tried to chase down his mate in the bus in front, and finally a blaring off-frequency radio station for the final hour in the dark.  Anyway...

After a more leisurely trip back to Lima, proceeded down through the desert coastline to the Ballestas Islands, home to millions of sea birds (with a deserted guano factory), sea lions and the rare tiny cutie humboldt penguin.  Then the Nazca lines, 2000 years old but only discovered from the air in the mid 1920s when commerical flights began.  A lifetime of dedication by a certain german Marie Reiche and others led to the conclusion that they were used for agricultural and religious spiritual practices to induce the rains.  It can´t have worked too well though, the lines are still preserved in this, one of the driest places in the world.  From the 30min flight at 500m, I could look down in wonder at the huge "astronaut", monkey, condor, humming bird, spider and masses of geometrical lines stretching sometimes over kilometres, which was what led others to believe it is one huge astronomical calendar.

Down in a cadillac taxi to Mollendo on the southern coast, resembling a crumbling or deserted Blackpool, off-season with persistent cloud keeping the temp down to fleece levels.   A mysterious abandoned cliff-top castle out on the beach and crumbling wooden haciendas with empty swimming pools reflected the decline from its´ former glory as a mid 20th century trading and fishing port. 

Finally I headed back inland and towards the Bolivian border via Arequipa - a city I´d visited some 5 years, vaguely recollected as a great place where I had lots of the local "Ron" bacardi dispensed from the back of streetside camper vans, fireworks and revelry. 

I decided to climb the volcano El Misti, rising up behind the city.  Failing to heed the tour agency´s sage advice regarding the whereabouts of the path, I mistakenly took the local villager´s words at their merit that there was another track further up and around the side of the volcano that would be much quicker.  I was the last off the bus at the terminus in a middle-of-nowhere village, and became completely reliant on a scribbled line on the back of the bus ticket drawn by a retired hydraulic engineer on the back of a donkey.  I proceeded to wander and scramble through a mixture of thorny bush, paths to nowhere and deep dry gullies in the general direction of the hill.  After camping at 4500m, I headed straight for the top for 7.5hrs hard hours up steep rock scree and deep dust to reach the crater rim at 5800m by 4pm.  Despite my elation at reaching the top and at being able to fully run the whole way down in a joyous 40 minutes, darkness then descended again before I could find a good path back to the road, and I was obliged to spend a second night under the stars with no more than half a cup of water.  Next morning I did find the original track I should have ascended on, and then hitched a lift back in a tourist jeep returning to Arequipa.  My main legacy and reminder of this climb being 2 damaged big toes, one nail having parted company with the toe, the other still a deep shade of purple as I write this 6 weeks later...         

Back in Arequipa, I couldn´t recreate the spirit of years past, the only extertainment being a dozing Father Christmas in the main square at 2am, and a deserted karaoke bar offering accompaniment to classics such as ´twimkle twinkle little start´, ´always on my mine´and ´my away´.  Again, time to get out of Peru I felt, south via Lake Titicaca and into Bolivia.