It’s been quite a while since our last post and we have covered a lot of ground. We celebrated one year on the road in Huaraz in the spectacular Cordillera Blanca, a famous trekking area. We spent about a week there and did a few day treks from Huaraz. Unfortunatly, the weather wasn’t that good as it was the tail end of the rainy season; so every afternoon around four o’clock it poured with rain making the place very cold and damp, not the sort of conditions to go camping in. So we moved on to Lima.
Lima has a reputation for being an unpleasant, dangerous slum but we very much enjoyed our time there. The areas next to the Pacific were particularly nice and the weather very good. While we were there Peru held it’s general election, not only for the post of President but also for seats in Congress. Voting is complusory in Peru, so as the day went by we saw more and more people with blue fingers, as voters have to put a finger in blue dye so that they can’t vote twice. Sales of alcohol are also banned over the election weekend. Two and half weeks later there still isn’t a result, as the votes were so close, the candidates want every vote counted and checked, including those from overseas.
We then had a long bus ride to the south of the country to visit Nasca, a small town in the desert but well known for the famous ‘Nasca Lines’. These are outline representations of animals cut into the desert surface; the interesting thing about them is that they can only be seen from above; in fact they were only discovered in the 1920’s when pilots flying overhead saw the ‘pictures’ below them. We saw them by climbing an observation tower and a hill. As well as the pictures, there are aslo hundreds of straight lines which radiate for kilometers across the desert. No one really knows why the local people made them as they couldn’t see the pictures or lines from above. One of the worlds great mysteries.
After Nasca we continued travelling south through a barren but spectacular landscape, as the desert runs alongside the Pacific Ocean. Very much a rock and hard place where very few people live. Our destination was the delightful Colonial City of Arequipa. This has a wonderful aspect as it is surrounded on one side by snow capped Volcanos. As well as lovely architechture it also has a continual Spring like cilmate, warm and dry in the day and cool at night.
We used Arequipa as a base to visit Colca Canyon, the second deepest canyon in the world. We spent three days trekking in the Canyon, which is hot,dry and spectacular with bright,clear days and fantastic views of snowcapped mountains. We were also very lucky to see Condors close up. The Canyon is surrounded by small villages with very friendly Andean people, who keep herds of Llamas on the Altiplano, the high plains of the Andes.
Tomorrow we start our journey to Cusco and the Sacred Valley.
