Leaving our relative luxury in Lima was pretty hard but we headed to Ica and spent a day or so in what is pretty much a desert town where the amazing sanddunes that surround it are the main highlight. We were there during the two day Peruvian independence holiday, so it was heaving with people, which made it tricky to find a hotel but excellent for people watching.

Driving through the massive sand dunes and sandboarding were a lot of fun, even though our driver decided that we we weren´t good enough to sandboard properly so just sent us down on our bellies. Lots of fun and pretty scary too for me, Steve managed what I considered were death defying falls and turns in the buggy without so much as a squeak.

We´ve spent today in Nasca and took a flight over the Nasca Lines. I probably didn´t enjoy it as much as Steve as it turns out that my increasing fear of flying has reached a peak, (perhaps as i´m getting older?) and I spent most of the flight with my eyes squeezed tightly shut, wishing and praying that the pilot wouldn´t do so many steep dips to the left and right to give us all a good view. Anyway, the lines are pretty cool. It´s quite hard to see some of them because any lines that have been created in this type of desert (old river routes/car tracks etc) don´t ever lose their imprint, so you have to distinguish the lines from everything else.

Our 30 minute flight took us over a whale, an astronaut, a dog, a monkey, a condor, a spider, a humming bird, an alcatraz (not too sure what that is actually), a parrot, a tree and a pair of hands.

These animals and other geometrical lines were `discovered´ in the 1920´s and their history and reason for their creation is still unknown but they are believed to have been created between 900 BC and 600AD. Some people think they reflect the stars, others that they follow the line of ancient aqueducts, while others believe they were an important part of a particular religion.

Either way, they were created by removing sun-darkened stones to expose the lighter colour stones below. The 90m monkey is fairly impressive, not least because the nearest monkey at the time of its creation would have been on the other side of the Andes in the Amazon.

We now have a delightful overnight bus to Arequipe to look forward to.

ps. Still SUPER excited about getting engaged!>