5. Peru - Back on the Gringo Trail

Paracas National Reserve

Most of our travel arrangements are a la Carte but back in Lima we came across and had a recommendation for a company called Peru Hop which ran a coach service with drop off points at a variety of places we wanted to visit.  Time spent at each location was our choice and they did have some good accommodation discounts whose veracity was checked by my fellow traveller.   Peru Hop would take us as far as La Paz, across the border in Bolivia, in about a month or so, costing a hundred dollars or so more than us booking individual coaches.  Apart from the hotel discounts, we would be picked up and dropped at our hotel so no taxis to and from out of the way bus stations and it was more convenient than making eight or ten separate coach bookings.  

So we had another early start heading south through hours of more desert but a less attractive landscape to the coastal town of Paracas.   Courtesy of our Peru Hop discount we had a sea view balconied room on the third floor for 120 Soles ($40/£32) including breakfast and what turned out to be mythical wi-fi.  We were here to visit the nearby National Reserve and some bird reserve islands a few miles offshore.

The National Reserve was wind-sculpted desert sand running down to dramatic cliffs above the crashing Pacific Ocean.  A strong offshore wind was blowing and sand was streaming across the ground.   Our guide wasn’t too good on the wildlife, telling us that the desert was “empty and nothing lives there”.  For those of you who don’t know, desert is a very rich habitat but just as you would, most of the creatures in it keep out of the sun and tend to be nocturnal.  To us it was just so unusual a sight with the vastness of sand and rocky outcrops to one side and the variety of shades of blue of the sea on the other.  Our highlight here was seeing our first Andean Condor of this trip being chased off by Turkey Vultures over one of the beaches.  This Condor is the largest flying bird in the world by combined weight and wingspan.  How you combine weight and length like that I don’t know but I suppose it‘s like all those esoteric cricket and baseball statistics.  For the number nuts amongst you it has a wingspan of 10 feet 10 inches compared to the Wandering Albatross wingspan of 11 feet 6 inches.  It is a big bird.  The swan we normally see has a wingspan a little over 7 feet.

Heather overheard a conversation between two couples which ran as follows.  One couple had cycled to the reserve with the intention of camping overnight.  “Oh, cool” was the response.  Well no, it had been so windy, including all the sand that was blowing with it that they weren’t able to find anywhere to pitch a tent other than in a dirty and smelly car park.

 Islas Bellestas and birds

The Islas Ballestas were a far better experience although we weren’t allowed to land.  Thirty or forty minutes from Paracas in a fast boat to a small group of rocky islands cut through by the sea

Blue-footed Boobies

with many arches and caves plus thousands of seabirds.  In general, there were large numbers of few species.  Not many Humboldt Penguins but lots of Blue-footed Boobies which look very much like Gannets in blue suede shoes, Pelicans (variety unknown to us) and lots of a most beautiful bird, the Inca Tern.  This bird is matt black with a little white at the end of the wings, bright red legs and bill with a downturned white moustache and a yellow flash below the white.   There were also the

Shark Life Jackets to
add a little confidence

distinctly 






un-avian sealions and the whole lot accompanied by the pervasive aroma of guano.  In the usual hyper-inflated description of tourist spots these days the not far offshore Islas Ballestas are described as “the poor man’s Galapagos” which is a bit like describing Brownsea Island or Ellis Island as “the poor man’s Galapagos”.  Well worth visiting though.

The birds are drawn here by the rich food source of the sea which here is caused by the cold Humboldt Current flowing north from the Antarctic.  It’s the largest upwelling current in the world and is responsible for the world’s most productive marine ecosystem.  The water warms as it gets towards the tropics and rises to the surface bringing vast amounts of nutrients and plankton with it.  This feeds the fish, which feeds the birds and the humans and the whole ecosystem relies on it.  When the sporadic El Nino, a warm current comes along it disrupts the whole cycle, bringing much rain where it is normally arid and causing huge physical and economic damage.

Inca Terns

The Peru Hop system is really a glorified coach trip but because we’re staying longer than most other passengers in each stop, we see a different group of people each journey.  They generally don’t seem to be on gap-years but are usually rather slightly older people on sabbaticals or who have just saved and packed in their jobs to travel.  We still raise the average age whenever we board a coach though.  A hostel chain called The Wild Rover is often a stopping spot for a lot of these travellers and the name gives the style of the place away really.  One couple told us that the music went on until at least 4.00am.  So not quite our style.

This was about the time one of my security measures was found to be wanting.  I’d hidden a debit card under the cushioned sole of inside one of my boots and found out that after a few weeks of slight flexing, said debit card had split.

 

not the Sahara - Peru

We had what for us was a quick stop of two days at Huacachina, which really was a small oasis of mostly tourists set around a lagoon about three hundred yards by a hundred yards and surrounded on all sides by huge sand dunes.  It really wasn’t what we were expecting in Peru.  Somewhere around the Sahara, Mali perhaps or Burkina Faso (neither on my list of potential destinations) but

Huacachina

not Peru.  Climbing several hundred feet to the to the top of one of the lower ridges we had a landscape as far as we could see of dunes in every direction.  An amazing sight despoiled by the amount of thoughtlessly discarded litter, plastic bottles and bags mostly semi covered in the ceaselessly blown sand.  That’s the visible litter.  The aural litter was supplied by a hundred or so dune-buggies which set off roaring away through this beautiful landscape in the afternoon providing adrenaline rides for apparently deaf people.  That ceaseless blown sand is worse than any beach I’ve been on, it’s very dry, tiny grained and gets everywhere.  As you’d expect, I was very careful with the camera but even that sounded a little more crunchy than usual when using the telephoto in the following couple of days.  Oh and despite very regular showers sand was still coming out of one of my ears for two or three days - and yes it was sand, not sawdust !   Somewhat ironically, our hotel taps failed to produce anything on both mornings for a couple of hours, so there we were in an oasis with no water.