Lima, Pisco and the Islas Ballestas

We decided to go to Peru because they've got good wine in Chile :-). We started in Lima, because that's where the airport is, but then quickly out of there!

We decided to go to Peru because they've got good wine in Chile :-). Patrik had been diligently studying Spanish for a year, I was relying on the leftovers of what Kuzma and I once picked up during 3 months in Mexico, Guatemala and Cuba. Patrik and Miloš had left a week earlier, because they had more time off work and I was in the Alps with the family. They did a trek on Huascarán.

The real travelling only started at the airport in Munich. I'd scheduled a business trip to Munich and my boss even drove me all the way to the airport. At the airport I dealt with a pile of emails and then I switched it all off. In Madrid a ham roll and wine, the flight left at 0:35 and as usual I slept the whole way.

The deal was that we'd meet the lads at the Plaza de Armas by the fountain. Since we'd arranged it back in January and after the third Pilsner, I'd forgotten whether we were supposed to meet there every even or every odd hour. On the plane I sat next to a young Australian who was on a round-the-world trip and had just flown in from northern Sweden, where he'd spent a couple of weeks skiing in some abandoned settlement. Together we worked out that I'd simply have to find a pub with a view of that fountain :-). Luckily Patrik's theory that our phones wouldn't work here didn't pan out. They worked, so we quickly agreed on a new meeting place, Plaza de San Martín. I waited there by the fountain for a while, then I heard hollering and two monsters were approaching me. Mud, dust, peeling sheets of skin, basically two white gringos back from 4800 m above sea level, where they'd burnt their mugs off :-).

The mood was cheerful, so we moved straight to a pub. I was hungry for a late lunch, it didn't occur to me that it was nine in the morning, which is why the waitress was surprised not only that we wanted a big midday meal, but also three large beers on top of it. A beer here is 625 ml, so really large :-).

Lima hasn't surprised us so far. A classic equatorial dirty and above all noisy city, pretty dry and dusty. Lots of rather small and battered cars, far fewer motorbikes than in Asia or Africa. Hardly anyone speaks English, and badly at that. My Spanish is coming back slowly and rather passively, but I can still order a beer and food and numbers are fine. The girl in the pub recommended us a bus station, there are loads of tiny ones here, each company has its own and each one goes somewhere different. It was just a few minutes' walk and we got lucky, a bus in our direction was leaving in about 10 minutes. Later it turned out we kept having this luck. We suspect Patrik secretly plans it that way every time. Or else it's because there's one bus for every two Peruvians.

Only the drive out of Lima showed us its true face. The further from the centre, the more rubble, rubbish and half-collapsed houses. When we'd been driving for more than an hour and the road was still lined with more and more demolished houses and behind every village there were carefully arranged piles and piles of rubble, it started to seem odd to me. Surely Peruvians can't be such animals that they'd live in rubble!?

After consulting LP (Lonely Planet) and Patrik we found the explanation, which turned my initial disdain for the locals into respect and pity.

In 2007 this coast of Peru was hit by a brutal earthquake and the piles of rubble outside the towns are simply the remains of clearing away the demolished houses. Evidently not one stone was left standing on another. The whole landscape is totally dry and the further from Lima the more it resembles Mars. That's probably why the piles of rubble don't get overgrown with nettles like back home and it looks really depressing.

After four hours of rattling along in an Economico bus they dropped us off in the dust by the road, where a cluster of touts immediately pounced on us. It's really interesting to observe this phenomenon of touts anywhere in the tropics. Whether it's Cuba, Guatemala, Tanzania or Peru, the moment a gringo or barang (basically a white face) sticks his nose out on the street, a cluster of touts latches onto him. The range on offer varies, accommodation, taxis and food everywhere, but in some places also a daughter, a sister or other similar services.

In Peru only the acceptable range has shown up so far. We let a nice lady arrange a taxi to the centre of Pisco and she immediately gave us a choice of several leaflets for various accommodation. We're very suspicious, but the price looked good and in the end the place was even nice. A room for three with its own shower cost 70 soles, so about 500 CZK for three of us.

The lads had come down from the mountains so they were gagging for a shower, I wanted to head into town for fruit. The landlady was horrified that I wanted to go somewhere alone. That was already suspicious, because the guide had also been drumming into us that we could only go into town in daylight and with nothing on us, especially no cameras. Patrik and I are mainly here with photographic intentions and we lug around big SLRs, so going into town without cameras is torture. Since I was going alone on top of that, I only took some money in my pocket and the landlady arranged a moto-taxi for me for 1.5 sol (10 CZK). It took me to a splendid market, where local grannies had piles of tropical fruit spread out on the ground. I loaded up a full bag and took a moto-taxi back. We immediately scoffed half of it and set off into town together.

As three of us it was apparently OK to walk, but without cameras. The town isn't as wrecked as the outskirts of Lima, but you still often see rubble and above all the omnipresent dust and dirt. But people are decently dressed in normal European clothes and clean.

In the end we walked across the square all the way back to the market, which we crawled through from one end to the other. It was beautifully photogenic, grannies, kids, colourful fruit, all on packed earth. Patrik and I were swearing like troopers that we'd let ourselves be talked into going out without cameras. At least I had a little compact, which I mostly carry as an HD camera. People were generally pretty friendly and were happy to be photographed.
After going through the market we returned to the square, where we stared in disbelief at the endless queues at the banks. There were about three of them and all of them had a queue stretching outside, maybe thirty metres. They were probably handing out benefits or something. In the end we had to change money at an exchange office at the back of a big electronics shop. At the entrance to that shop there was a bloke in a uniform who wanted to take our backpacks off us. So I went in alone and the lads stayed with the bags.

Then we were looking for a pub and dinner. Peruvian food pleasantly surprised me. In Lima we had Ceviche, which is a mix of all sorts of sea creatures chopped into pieces and marinated in lime juice and……. On the plate it's mixed up like a salad with bits of onion, potato and other things unknown to us. Although I don't like sea creatures because they stink of fish, this was excellent. So in Pisco we had a tortilla de carne, which didn't resemble a Mexican tortilla at all, it was more like an omelette with beef. Excellent again.

In the morning they gave us breakfast, and for the first time it became clear that the local idea of breakfast is bread with jam and coca tea.

After breakfast they loaded us into a van with a bunch of other gringos and drove us to the port of Paracas, from where boats go out to the Islas Ballestas. While waiting for the boat and then on the boat we met lots of interesting people. For example we were talking about an interesting little family, a skinny blonde, a European-looking bloke, two small kids, about 3 and 6. I said I'd never get my wife and kids out here like this German (they were speaking German). While getting on the boat I thanked him for something with a danke and he replied "you're welcome" in Czech :-). He's a doctor who was born in Austria, has Czech parents and he and his German wife met in a hospital in Ecuador. Then they heard about a newly opened hospital in the Peruvian mountains and they've been working there for 3 years now.

Another interesting pair was a father and son from Slovakia. The son had worked for years in Sydney as a beach manager and then took his savings and invited his dad on a 6-month trip around the world. They were already well past halfway and the stories they told made our heads spin (especially the father :-) ). Another interesting person was a beautiful tall Belgian woman who had set off around South America for 12 months. She was sitting next to me, so I gave her a proper interrogation about what it's like to be a blonde travelling alone through countries like Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia or Peru. She said she's practically never alone, because she always meets someone in the hotel. I believe it.
The boat held about 20 gringos and about 5 boats went out. Apparently a decent attraction. The first stop was by the coast, where a sand dune towered above the cliff, about 200 m high. On the dune there was a figure measuring 148x50 m. The origin of this figure called Los Candelabros (meaning candelabra) is as much a mystery as the Nazca lines about 200 km further into the desert. They were created by the local culture long before the Incas, so about 2000 years ago. How they managed to carve or tamp down that sand or whatever, so that such enormous figures survived 2000 years, simply isn't known.

Our arrival at the islands was announced in advance partly by the noise of thousands and thousands of birds, partly by the stink of their excrement. Settled and dried bird excrement is mined as a precious organic fertiliser, guano. Just as last year I couldn't grasp the idea of several hundred thousand migrating animals in Tanzania, here it was impossible to comprehend the quantity of cormorants, pelicans and other birds that took off and landed again on the white islands in flocks of thousands. Down below them hundreds of sea lions were barking away and now and then a small group of Humboldt penguins would stroll past. I'd never seen penguins before, so I was thrilled, I just wondered what they were doing this far north of the South Pole. Patrik knew, the cold Humboldt Current flows northwards along the coast of Peru and brings in the nutrients that are vital for these species.

The second part of the trip after lunch was by minibus and we drove through the desert of the Paracas peninsula. Much more interesting than the desert were the stories and the cleavage of the Belgian girl sitting next to me :-). Across the desert with fossils of various shells we reached a viewpoint above the bay, which was breathtaking. Then they took us down to the port, where we again had an excellent lunch, this time with a fantastic view as well. Since it's about 30 degrees, we also went for a swim in the sea, Miloš even climbed onto a rocky islet full of birds.

The journey back only got interesting between Paracas and Pisco, which are 2 towns about 15 km apart, both hit by the earthquake, and the desert road between them is almost entirely lined with hundreds of piles of rubble that the trucks hauled there after the earthquake. An extremely depressing sight. We jumped off the bus at our little hotel, used the clean toilet (a rare thing, always worth using) and got a taxi to take us to the Pan American highway about 10 km away. The taxi cost 7 soles, so 49 CZK :-). Within five minutes of arriving we were sitting on a bus to Ica, where we needed to change to a long-distance bus to Arequipa. Before the bus left Ica we stuffed ourselves silly at a local fast-food chicken place.

The bus from Ica to Arequipa was more like a luxury plane. We sat on the upper deck, wide fancy seats that recline practically into a bed, TV (unfortunately with a Japanese martial arts film), a stewardess bringing drinks, dinner and breakfast, brilliant. A ticket for the 10-hour journey to Arequipa (700 km) for 100 soles (700 CZK).