Another Long-drag bus ride from Cusco to Nasca, 14 hours overnight through Mountains and Desert terrain. Not suprisingly it was freezing cold, but the bus was relatively comfortable, apart from the dirty hippies sitting infront of me!

Bus services in Peru try tp replicate those of airflights, all have a stewardess, blankets and food!! Very amusing to try and watch the stewardess negotiate a bus rolling form one side to the other along a mountain pass, trying to dish out boxes of food and serve drinks. What can I say about the food...hmmm...basically a stew of rice and bones. What kind of meat I don{t care to imagine, beef - maybe, lamb - possible, lama - a good chance, dog or rodent -most likely.

The desert scenery was pretty amazing and quite unexpected, but we eventually arrived in Nasca and quickly booked our Cesna flight over the Famous Nasca Lines. Before boarding the plane, we decided to refuel with breakfast. Another great meal...NOT! Nasca is not the best of places, only developed from tourism for the lines. So we found a small cafe and ordered coffee, orange juice and two cheese sandwiches. The waitress, went round the corner to get the juice from next door cafe, for the coffee we receiced a cup of tepid water and a jar of nescafe, and the sandwiches were made by the waitress crouching behind the bar..culminating in two slices of stale white bread and old white cheese. Lets just say, we went hungry that morning.

Probably a blessing for what was to come with the flight! let me just recap...the Nasca Lines are Lines carved into the desert dating back anything up to 2000 years, formed in the shapes of differing animals and geometric shapes. The origins and reasons for these lines are unknown, but speculation ranges from extraterrestrial to cosmic calendar to spritiual water worship.

A five seater cesna plane, banking left to right time and a gain to view the Lines over Nacsa. Sofia saw the first two and then I was instructed to take photos so she could see what the looked like once we were back on terra firma. Probably the worst 50 quid spent so far. We would need paying serious money to do again.

On another sour note, I do have o mention here that Nasca (well infact a great deal of Peru) smells of Piss! There is no nice way of putting it really, it just does. You can surely imagine that you can only have so much of that, hence we took the next bus out of there to Ica, and the oasis town of Huacachina.

Here, a supposedly beautiful oasis in the desert ( another small holding in the desert with one stagnant pool of green water) again smelling of piss! Here we spent the day sandboarding, fun but uncomfortable and overrated.

Another nightbus down to Arequipa, inland this time, and the next day onto Puno. Still desert but we eventually arrived at the shores of Lake Titicaka (highest lake in the world).

Normally a quite boring town but we were very fortunate to arrive mid carnival, drums, dancing bears (not real ones), small large waisted womed in silly hats spinning around to a combination of mariachi and salsa music.

The initial joy we experienced was extenguished after 15 hours, and the partygoers decamped to outside our hotel window. The music can get quite irritating after 5 hours of the same tune.

The day after, we took a short excursion to the floating reed islands and then another bus onto Bolvia!!!