Buggy Boogie Woogie*

On Thursday, GAP Adventures put on a special trip for all of us to head south from Cusco for the day on a 25-seater minibus with reclining seats and video screen (this was like first class compared to the cattle class offered by Peregrine Tours in Antigua). We set off at 4 am! After leaving the sprawl of Lima we soon hit the desert but irrigation has brought large areas of the land into cultivation with fruit, maize and cotton the main products. We passed through Chincha, the capital of African-Peruvian culture where Gregg had hoped to hear some of the unique music played there but all he got was more bloody Pan pipes and El Condor Paso. We then went to the Paracas peninsula, near Pisco (where the local hooch comes from to make the famous Pisco Sour). Paracas is one of the great marine bird reserves with the highest concentration of marine birds in the world and was home to one of Peru’s ancient civilizations who carved “El Candelarbo” in the sandy rock.

We took a boat out to the Islas Ballestas, which was one of the reasons for the early start as by midday the sea becomes quite rough. The islands are spectacular, eroded into numerous arches and caves which provide homes for thousands of sea birds and sea lions. We were told the names of the sea birds (as in “that’s a cormorant” rather than “that one is called Enrico”) so we saw cormorants and red-legged cormorants, frigate birds, grey-footed boobies, Huboldt penguins, pelicans as well as the bird that is locally known as the “guano bird” in their thousands. It is these birds that make the islands quite valuable because every four years Peru’s Ministry of Agriculture collects the guano (it can get up to 3metres deep) and sells it is organic fertilizer - because it is such a valuable commodity there is a small house on the islands where the “bird-shit police” guard against illegal gathering.



After lunch we went further down the coast to amazingly high sand dunes - Simon insisted they were the highest in the world but the BBCs Planet Earth series had said the highest/biggest/oldest were in Namibia but as we don’t have The Guinness Book Of World Records with us we still don’t know. Anyway there were high enough as we all went on Dune buggies at break neck speeds, holding on for dear life – better than anything at Alton Towers. A few of the less faint hearted even went sandboarding down the dunes.




On the way back we briefly visited the oasis at Huacachina where the greenish sulphur-rich (and stinky) waters are said to have curative properties – we didn’t try.
A long drive back through the desert and a beautiful sunset over the Pacific.
* Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band