Peru in a Hurry!

Well as I said our hostel owner, acted as tour agent and organized an amazing action packed week  for us, and he did it all for free.

Firstly this entailed getting up at three in the morning to catch the amazing Cruz de Sur bus to Parracas, (this bus had a hostess, two toilets flat screen TVs, WiFi, as well as a computer pod in the first class section) not to mention pillows and blankets. We arrived in Parracas where the guide he had arranged picked us up and rushed us to the port to catch the boats to Islas Bellezas.

The boats were open top speed boats packed with other tourists that raced around the islands. On the way they passed an ancient symbol carved into the side of a hill called the candelabra. Its origen remains unknown but they think it was used as a navigational tool. Or it could represent a cactus. Or some people think it was done by masons (seriously).

The islands themselves were teeming with birds and sealions and of course guano or bird sh*t which is actually a big money making industry so there are guys whose job it is to live on the islands and protect the guano.

The beach of Sea Lions

A guy in Parracas and his trained Pelican

After visiting the islands, we were met by our guide, who took us out to see the sites of Parracas national reserve.

This turned out to be a private trip in his car, and we got to see many of the isolated beaches and sand dunes of the reserve.

The red beach

There used to be  a rock archway behind here but it was  destroyed by an earth quake

A tiny fishing town inside the reserve.

After a long hot dry day looking at beaches we got on yet another bus and headed into the desert to the oasis town of Huacachina.

Huacacina was once a resort town for locals but has since become a resort town for international tourists. Set around a beautiful oasis lake with it’s old original architecture the rest of the town is hostels all with excellent swimming pools as it is really hot here. Whilst in Huacachina we scaled the enormous sand dune that surround the town and then took an insanely exhillerating and probably pretty dangerous dune buggy ride through the dunes with stops along the way to sand board down these insanely steep, insanely high dunes.

Huacacina from the top of the nearest sand dune- it took us nearly half an hour to scale the damn thing

The dune buggy- did I mention the seatbelts were tied on?

Sam about to sand board on his tummy

PS. I accidentally posted these out of order so there is another new post below this one.

Peru in a Hurry Pt2

After two nights in Huacachina we were off again this time to Nazca where we had a flight booked over the Nazca lines.

I (Amelia) was of course dreading this, not liking planes and especially not light planes. But it was too late to pull out, the whole thing was paid for and before I knew it we were at the airport.

The plane was tiny and bounced around constantly leaving your stomach in your mouth as it twisted and turned over the lines.

The lines themselves were pretty spectacular but not as big as pictures had made them look. The meaning of the lines is still unknown as is there origin.

here are some of our less than spectacular photos

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If you look closely you can see the condor shape in the centre. It is highly stylized of course.

Well Nazca whilst having the lines was one of the ugliest cities we visited, Arequipa the next city on our itinerary was one of the prettiest. Cobbled streets, colourful old colonial  houses and an amazing and vast ancient monastery were why we fell in love with this place, and this love was further fueled by the super cheap room we stayed in in an old terraced house. It’s shuttered windows overlooked the monastery and the rooftop patio had great views.

 

 

The city also had some excellent food, we had the best Mexican food I have ever eaten in this tiny Mexican pub not to mention tequila slammers and pina coladas, and we had some of the excellent local foods (most of which included potato and the giant maize kernels, apart from the ceviche which Sam ate that was made from raw fish marinated heavily in lemon). We meant to only stay a few days in Arequipa but ended up staying a week. However three of the days were spent hiking through the Colca Canyon, we tried to hire a tent and do it ourselves however, the tour operators offered such cheap alternatives that we ended up going with a guide and four English lads on their gap year and a French Canadian.

The hike was spectacular( as the Colca Canyon is the second deepest canyon in the world, second only to the neighboring canyon which is much more difficult to reach and therefore more expensive. The hike began at the top of the canyon where condors could be seen gliding on the thermals. We then hiked down to the bottom of the canyon (a 1.2 km drop in altitude) along a narrow and slightly treacherous donkey path that locals that live at the bottom of the canyon use with their mules and donkeys to bring supplies and their produce to neighboring towns that can’t be accessed by roads. We passed several locals with their traditional clothes and animals laden with goods. We spent both nights sleeping in guest houses at the bottom of the canyon. The second night was particularly cool as we stayed in a hut made of bamboo in a oasis where all the guest houses had large pools filled with fresh water (which they drained and refilled every second day, much to our astonishment coming from drought effected Adelaide.)

 

On the second day I (Sam) made the mistake of agreeing to take part in a game of foot-to-ball or soccit or whatever it’s called. The teams were Commonwealth (read four English, one Australian) vs Peru vs a German, two Brazillians and two Fench Canadians. So anyway, as you can probably tell, I was surrounded by people who could actually play sport. Nonetheless, I managed to score the first goal of the game, before we were absolutely creamed by the Peruvians, and I managed to get completely buggered in the process.

The last day’s start was at 5 in the morning before we had to complete an uphill hike of about 3 hours back to the top of the canyon. It was moderately exhausting but we managed to avoid the sunlight and the canyon looked pretty spectacular under the (really) early morning light. We arrived at the small town at the top of the hill via the terraced corn fields and were treated with breakfast, before we caught the bus back to Arequipa. Because we liked the city so much (and because our accommodation was so cheap) we decided to spend some extra time in Arequipa before making our way to Puno.

Whilst Arequipa was one of the prettiest cities we visited, Puno was one of the ugliest, which  seemed in stark contrast to the beautiful lake Titicaca which it was situated next to. The highlight of our stay was a visit we made to the floating islands. These are man made islands made from compacted reed which float on top of the lake. They are covered in small huts, the odd tourist restaurant and even the odd church and each have small communities living on them. They were quite beautiful as they are decorated in structures in the shape of animals and creatures from local folklore- and are connected through amazing reed gondolas that  are two stories high and also shaped like various animals.

One of the more simple gondolas

Me dressed up in the local costume(as you can see it is colourful but the cut doesn’t do much for ones figure)

One of the local island women on the island

A view of Puno from the boat

Whilst we were in Puno we thought we would get our first taste of Inca ruins, so we visited a fertility temple in one of the neighbouring villages, of course it was full of penis statues and somewhat disturbingly was full of children who earned extra money for their families by acting as guides.

So Sorry- we are the worst bloggers in the universe!

Hey guys -so sorry but I have this huge backlog of posts that we wrote ages ago but couldn’t post due to poor internet connections.

Unfortunately I just posted the last two in the the wrong order so please read “Keep on Truckin” first

Keep on Truckin

So where did I leave off last post. Thats right Bariloche CHOCOLATE Capital of the Continent (ironic seeing as the Mayans invented the art. Imagine the world before chocolate – what is the point of living.) So after Bariloche we boarded the bus-truck for our last border crossing of the whole tour- and unfortunately the most rigorous as our driver had managed to piss off the authorities last time he crossed. But prior to the border crossing we had to drive through the stunning lake district which included a brief stop as our driver and ’TOUR LEADER” and one Australian guy still drunk from the previous night jumping of a 5-7 meter high bridge into glacial melt water BRRRRRRRRRR. Finally after making it through the border- (they managed to find two pieces of fruit which they paraded in front of us all victoriously) we headed to the Chilean town of Pucon. This was one of my favourite places as the weather was great, the town was clean and pretty and the scenery AMAZING-all volcanoes and mountains. Even cooler was the fact that the town had a special traffic light pattern that would come on if there needed an emergency evacuation due to one of the volcanoes. Whilst we were there another town in Chile had been evacuated due to a volcano eruption. The coolest thing about Pucon was the huge array of adventure sports it had on offer, ranging from Sky Diving to Hydropeed(going over rapids on a boogie board. Unfortunately we only had two days there so we could only sample a small selection of the activities on offer. On the first day, acompanied by almost all of our tour group we donned backpacks full of climping gear and boarded a bus to the villarica volcano that loomed over the town. The first part of the climb involved getting on a small ski lift that went surprisingly high and made a disconcerting amout of noise as it rattled along its way. This was Sam’s firat time on a ski lift and he was a little disturbed by the absence of safety railings at the front and was really concerned about how one goes about getting off the thing at the other end. Thankfully aided by two burly chilean men we were able to disembark without incidence. We then began our long (at least three hour)  trudge upwards to the smoke filled cone of the volcano. At first this just involved walking on loose stones and rock but as we climbed  we finally reached the snow line and got to don propper climbing gear- crampons (thats right it rhymes with tampons) and full on wind suits, helmets ice picks and gloves. Climbing in the ice was exillerating if not at times a little frightening as we were walking on glaciers with crevasses and it was very easy to slip. I kept envisioning me careering down a windswept valley a la Cliffhanger except without Sylvester Stallone to save me (or not save me as was the case in the movie). The guides led us up the volcano at a turtle’s trudge in a zig zag, which got a bit hairy at times when the slope seemed to exceed 45 degrees, but the view at the top was definitely worth every minute. From the crater the town of Pucon looked like a blip, and other volcanoes in the range could be seen. The crater itself belched sulfur, which made looking into it difficult, but it was so deep anyway that you couldn’t see the bottom, only a steep conical hole that disappeared into nowhere. Unfortunately we forgot to put our memory card into the camera so until we can plug our actual camera into the computer, you’ll just have to take our word for it that it was pretty stunning.

The next day was uneventful…. until we went WHITE WATER RAFTING on LEVEL 4 RAPIDS!!! Amelia managed to organise a rafting trip for 14 of the people on the tour for a cheaper price than Tucan’s recommended company. Apparently Pucon is one of the few places where licensed rafting companies will take novices out on level four (out of 6) rapids, elsewhere the norm is level 3. Which was probably no consolation for the raft which capsized on the second rapid. Our boat, however, worked like a well oiled machine, and managed to assist in the rescue of our friends. In fact I (Sam) was the only one in our boat to fall out. Our guide was excellent, and talked us through each rapid as we approached them (which were called intimidating names such as “hell’s gate” or “the colon mincer”) giving us the commands which we would end up forgetting in the excitement. My favourite part by far was when he took us up the side of a rock in the middle of the river, and then slid us back down the rock so that we completed the rapids backwards! he even let us swim through the lower level rapids, which was fun once you blanked out the icy cold waters. In the middle of the course was a rapid which couldn’t be commercially navigated by raft: read, we had to get out while our guides effortlessly took the rafts down the treacherous falls. Instead we got to traverse the rapid by walking around and jumping down a five meter drop into the icy water. The drop seemed to go on for ever and you could feel your stomach rising into your throat! The rafting was one of the most exhilirating experiences of our lives, needless to say our guide got a pretty decent tip. We finished the day with a trip to the natural hot springs where we soaked in the murky waters for longer than the recommended time and probably got a fatal dose of mercury because of it.

After Pucon, we were one free camp away from Santiago, and leaving our friends on the Tucan tour bus-truck behind. On our way to Chile’s capital, we stopped briefly at a waterfall/tourist trap for lunch. That evening, on easter eve, we stayed for the last time in a service station in our tent, a frankenstein’s monster created from the body of number 14 and the fly of number 4. the next morning our tour leader organised an easter egg hunt, after which we left for the smoggy city of Santiago.

Good Bye everybody!!!!

Pucon was great, but yet again we had to move on Pronto! So we loaded up the truck for what would be the last free camp for Sam and I. We were headed for Santiago where Sam and I would be leaving Tucan and finding our own way again.

Fittingly our last free camp was in an ugly alotment by a very flashy chilean petrol station. 

Love my hideous argentinean track pants,

We reached Santiago on easter sunday, and unsurprisingly not much was open, however we were able to find a cute cafe and sample the first of many Chilean set lunch menus where you could get three or four courses plus a drink for around Australian $8 and wouldn’t need to eat for the rest of the day. We spent our days hanging out in the city with the rest of the tour guys until it was time for them to move on and us to move out of the hotel where we were hiding out and find ourfeet again.

Goodbye drinks

Goodbyes

 

We stayed in a wicked hostel “Sammy’s Hostel” where you got an awesome breakfast and managed to see the sites around Santiago.

These included the amazing gardens in the city   and the other big park

where you would have had a great view of the city if it wasn’t for the smog.

We also visited the beautiful city of valpraiso, on the coast, about an hour and a half our of santigao. However we forgot to bring our camera, and couldn’t photograph the cobbled streets and colourful terraced houses. It was here that Sam fell in love with one of Pablo Nerudas many whimisically deigned and furnished houses. 

After a week in santiago it was time to board one of those cazy gravity defying machines called aeroplanes and head to Lima.

Lima was not the best introduaction to Peru. The city was bustling, but dirty and there didn’t seem to be a whole lot to do there.

Some of the prettier sites around Lima

However out hostel was great and the owner organised an amazing action packed week for us as we made our way to Arequipa.