This is all the gear we took with us for 9 days exploring Peru. The busses you see are on our street, Avenida San Martin. San Martin was the person who liberated Peru, Bolivia and Argentina from the Spaniards. The white building in the background is Hotel “B”. A high end classy hotel. Just to the right of this picture is a huge statue (in the middle of the road) of Senior San Martin. This is just one block north of our apartment.
This is the bus that picked us up. Peru Hop operates a service where you can go to one city, stay as long as you want, hop on the next Peru Hop daily bus and go to the next city, stay as long as you like, etc. You have a year to do your entire route. The busses are comfortable, air conditioning, a movie at night, a bi-lingual guide to keep things organized and explains trip options.
Heading south from Lima, there are endless miles of desert.
This is some of the typical housing seen in the southern desert area.
Our first stop, was a 16th century plantation. This is their private church. The whole complex was destroyed by earthquake a couple times, but new owners rebuilt.
A small part of the ornate alter inside that private church at the plantation.
One of the reasons we came here was to see the network of underground tunnels. Over 17 miles worth. These were used to transport and hide slaves. Early on slaves were taxed so this trick saved money. Later when slavery became illegal (about the same time as in the US) these tunnels ran all the way to the sea to sneak slaves onto the plantation. We spent some time in a gruesome cell down here where unruly slaves were left to die.
A huge copper tub at the plantation.
On the way to the plantation we took a detour through a creek bed. The main road, although still sort-of intact was severely damaged in a flash flood a couple years ago.
Paracas is a fishing town a few hours south of Lima. This friendly pelican was there to greet us.
Some of the fishing boats in Paracas.
We got on a boat with about twenty other folks to head out to Ballasteros Islands, where there is a lot of bird life. The islands are sometimes call a poor man’s Galapagos.
Heading out to the islands.
A huge symbol etched in the sand dune as we head out to the islands. Over a thousand years old.
Reminds me of the Saturday Night Live Jeopardy skit where someone acting to be Sean Connery would always screw up the names of the categories to grossly embarrass Alex Trebek. I’ll take Paraca Sex Plorer for $1,000.
We’ve made it to the islands. Over half a million birds.
Penguins! We have a video of them skitting along and diving in. They are really cute.
Sea lions!
Seals!
A whole hillside of hundreds of thousands of birds. How this works is, the bird shit, guano, becomes fish food when it drops or runs off into the water, the fish take it as food and do really well. Then the fish in turn become food for the bird life.
Before the islands became protected, there was a lot of money to be made in bird shit as fertilizer.
We saw several of these natural bridges. Our boat went into some pretty narrow and rough places, but we didn’t try navigating any of these spots.
After the islands, it’s back to the desert. A large national preserve where “the desert meets the sea.”
Some of the ‘rocks’ here were mostly salt.
This was a great place for Charlotte taking pictures of ‘textures’. One of her favorite things to do. I’ll try to get around to updating the Texture Page with some of her pics from here.
On the beach.
Next stop – a desert dune oasis.
Where we spend the night. There was one activity planned here.
A dune buggy ride and sand skiing. Charlotte has some quiet grandmother image of a buggy ride. And was completely thrown off by the death defying, flying, skidding, roller coaster freaking rip across the dunes. It was too much for her broken back (from a fall off a crashing bus in Nepal years ago – another story). We tipped a buggy driver big time to give us a gentle ride back. Had to skip the sand skiing.