This blog is sort of killing a few blogs with one stone because we did an awful lot of things in a short space of time.

We went to a very small town called Paracas which is just near to Pisco. Apparently the tour used to go to Pisco (the namesake of Peru's spirit) but there was a major earthquake in 2007 and the town still hasn't been rebuilt. Unfortunately there is literally nothing in Paracas and the only reason that we stop here is for an excursion to the Ballestos Islands where you can see a lot of native birds and other wildlife that resides there. Annoyingly, this excursion was an optional extra so if you wanted to do it you had to pay. I knew there would be optional excursions on the tour but I didn't think they would take us to a place for the sole purpose of doing that excursion but then make you pay for it. Probably more out of stubbornness we decided not to do the tour and just have a lie in instead. There really wasn't even anywhere to get breakfast from the next morning the town was so bare. If the weather had been better of course we could have chilled on the beach. At least we got to see the sunset (a little cloudy though) and there was a man throwing fish to some pelicans on the beach (and asking for money for the privilege of us witnessing it).

The next day we took a minivan that had been hired for us to go to Nasca with a few stopovers along the way. First off was for a tour around a vineyard that makes Pisco and Peruvian wine. This was quite nice because they still use old fashioned methods for pressing the grapes. Of course there was a tasting session at the end where the group soon discovered the reason why Peru is not famous for its wine. Due to the very dry conditions, the only grape that grows is very sweet and doesn't lend itself to fine wines. Even the Peruvians don't really like it!

Our next stopover was to a beautiful place called Huacachina. The bus journey so far had taken us through miles and miles of outstretched desert. Huacachina is a natural oasis in the middle of this desert so you have a small splash of blue water and greenery set against the vastness of the arid desert. Here we had lunch at a hotel and used their swimming pool before a group of us went off in dune buggies and did some sand boarding. The dune buggies are open 4x4 vehicles where the driver takes you on an incredible roller coaster ride up and down and sideways across the huge sand dunes of the desert. We stopped off at the top of a huge sand dune where we got out the sand boards (very similar to snowboards) to have an exhilarating downhill ride. In fact none of us are snowboarders so they recommend lying down on them on your fronts instead of standing up because if you fall off sand hurts a lot more than snow! No one was brave enough to try it standing up anyway! But still it was incredible fun even if sand did get literally everywhere! We did this 3 times down increasingly steep dunes before heading back to continue our journey.

Our final destination was Nasca, home of the Nasca lines. These are huge lines that form the shapes of various animals that have been etched into the desert thousands of years ago. They are so big that the only way to properly see them is from the sky, leading some people to believe that they were done by UFOs. Other people think they were made by the pre-inca civilisation, the Nascas, as perhaps some sort of constellation calendar. We went to a tower that you can climb so you can have a better view of the lines but this doesn't go up very high so you really don't get to see a lot. The only way to see them properly is to go in a small plane over them. This was of course very expensive so we both opted out of this excursion as well. In fact the whole group decided it was too expensive so again it was another town we had visited for no reason.

What was most annoying was that our hotel in Nasca was really far from town in the middle of nowhere, there were not even any shops around. This meant that we were not only stuck inside the hotel but we had no option but to eat dinner there which was of course incredibly overpriced, in fact 3 or 4 times as much as anywhere else. The hotel was also pretty run down. It did have a swimming pool but it looked like it hadn't been cleaned for weeks and there was a slide but it was made out of rough concrete so you couldn't actually slide down it! However, we made the most of it and played cards and drinking games late into the night. The next day we were given a traditional Pachamanca ceremonial meal. This involved food that is wrapped in banana leaves and placed on hot rocks and buried under the ground. It is apparently a meal that locals traditionally had as a way of connecting with Mother Earth. We had a traditional sweet drink made from corn to accompany a feast of chicken, beef and pork, three different types of potato, corn, green beans and something mushy wrapped up in a banana leaf! All this filled us up very nicely ready for our night bus to Arequipa.