We managed to leave Cusco (just!), and went to find Joel to begin our journey in Lima. First stop: Paracas, a ghost town, where we took a boat ride to the Ballestas Islands, which are covered in birds, sea lions, penguins and crabs. It was stunning. We put our feet in the Pacific, and chilled with the pelicans wandering along the beach, spotting jellyfish and huge crabs.
Our next stop was Huacachina, a lagoon in the middle of the desert. We arrived at night, so in the morning we were sufficiently surprise by the huge sand dunes that surrounded us. We walked up one and ran back down (squealing). We had a fantastic afternoon of sandboarding and buggying - it's always good to find and overcome fears in the same moment - and watched the sun set over the sand. We spent a day looking around Nazca. Saw some Lines.
Arequipa was lovely. It's a bigger city, that exists irrespective of tourism, so we ambled around the many churches, found the market, and ate on our hostel terrace, overlooking El Misti, a huge active volcano, and a series of snow-capped mountains. We took a two-day trip to Colca Canyon, where we saw some incredible landscapes - plains full of Andean deer, and more huge mountains covered in snow. When we arrived, we went for a walk with our group, and discovered, to our dismay, that all our time at altitude had left us at no advantage, and we were as breathless after a few seconds' uphill as the rest of the group. We hit up some thermal baths, and went for a dinner of quinoa soup and alpaca steak at a folkloric dance show. Participation was compulsory. We were up at 5.30am for some more spectacular views and plazas (complete with dancing) on our way to the Condor Viewpoint of the canyon, where, sure enough, the condors were there in all their glory! We spent an hour watching them have the best day, before walking along one side of the canyon. Having spent months in Cusco being told my hat was typical of Arequipa, I was loving spotting women (and some men) wearing the same one. I blended right in. We drove back to Arequipa through a snow storm, for an Arabic coffee (genuinely delicious) and a chilled evening watching the sun set over the volcano.
Our last Peruvian stop was Puno. The main attraction was our two-day visit to the islands on Lake Titikaka, one of the world's highest navigable bodies of water. A half-hour boat ride across the beautifully clear freshwater lake brought us to Uros, the floating islands made of reeds, where we spent the morning, learning how to make them (I'm looking forward to attempting to replicate that on the British coast sometime), learning about life on the 60 islands, and being dressed up in their clothes. In the afternoon we sat on the boat roof for the 3 hour journey to the island of the Amantani people, where we met our homestay families(!), and went for lunch with them (more potatoes, quinoa and rice), at the end of which, they handed us a mug of hot water, and gestured to the jar of leaves and twigs in the middle of the table, which turned out to be muna, a mint-like herb. It was delicious, and I can't help but see Karl Pilkington's brutal logic about how it's probably better not to get a taste for something that you can't get at home (or, in this case, anywhere else other than Lake Titikaka). We got to speak a bit of Quechua, before walking (with more altitude-induced difficulty) to the highest point of the island, the temple Pachatata, to watch the sun set over the lake and the peaks of the Bolivian snow-capped mountains. After more rice and potatoes with the family, they dressed us up in their clothes, and took us to a 'disco' with all the other tourists and their homestay families. There we danced like never before to the music of an Andean flute and a drum, until the musicians played no more, most left for bed, and we continued with our new friends from Holland, France, Zambia etc, singing and dancing and flouncing about in our skirts and ponchos. We visited the island of Taquile on the way back to Puno the next day, had a walk, and got a delicious lunch of fried trout (and chips and rice) overlooking the lake. After putting our feet in, we sailed back to the mainland, where we got all our salad for dinner for a single sol (25p) and met some new fun people in our hostel.
So that was Peru. Now on to Bolivia, where we have another great line-up of activities. We're getting used to our bus journeys, finding some good picnic ingredients (avocados and oranges as staples), and have generally failed to make sense of the diverse Peruvian landscapes. We've met some fun people, been bought and made coffee by friendly strangers, seen a lot of sunsets, (and sunrises!), and worn a lot of great outfits.
First stop: Copacabana.
We haven't stopped singing it.
