Peru: Lima to Paracas

Finally... the long-anticipated Peru trip report and photos! (Well, at least two people have asked for it, so I say that counts!) Get ready for multiple posts - our trip was three weeks long, so there are many stories to tell and more than enough photos to share.

First let me say this: Peru is an amazing place. If you were considering going there or if it hadn't crossed your mind... Go! Go now! If Machu Picchu isn't intriguing enough, there is also the Nasca Lines and many other archaeological sites which are all amazing. The people are friendly and welcoming. Definitely add it to your future vacation list.

Without further ado, the first installment of our Peru trip.

Lima and Paracas
We flew to Lima via Houston. Smooth flights, no issues. When you go through customs in Lima, each person pushes a button. Green light = Enter Peru. Red light = Customs officer looks through all of your stuff. Two green lights for us! We heeded the advice of our hotel and other travelers and used Taxi Green to get to Miraflores, a neighborhood of Lima. We got to our hotel, Albergue Miraflores, after midnight and went straight to sleep.

The next morning the hotel owner sat down with us over breakfast and gave us a very thorough overview of Miraflores and central Lima. Sights to see, where to eat, store locations, where not to go... After breakfast we walked down the street to a supermarket to purchase toiletries we didn't want to carry on the plane, toilet paper (very necessary to carry with you in Peru) and sunscreen. We spent the rest of the morning walking around Miraflores. We ate a light lunch of churros and chocolate before heading to catch our Cruz del Sur bus to Paracas at 2:00PM.

We opted to head to Paracas in the afternoon instead of 4AM the next morning to catch up on sleep. The bus was everything A (who has been to Peru before on a medical mission trip) said it was - very comfy seats (we were in "first class"), decent food, movies... a great way to get around.

We got to Paracas around 5:30 PM. The bus station itself is highly amusing - just an open-air stand on the grounds of a hotel.

We walked about half a mile down the main road to reach our hotel, Brisas del Bahia. We got the feeling we were the only guests that night (we never saw anyone else).

After dropping our stuff in our room we walked along the water front area and booked a tour for the next morning to the Islas Ballestas. No trouble booking there, at least at the beginning of May. We ate dinner at a restaurant on the main strip. A had tradito (it's like ceviche but no onions) and K had arroz con camerrones. Before dinner, we were given free tasting portions of pisco sours and Peruvian "popcorn". It's toasted corn kernels. Yum!

Good meal served by a 10-year-old waitress who was too cute. Talk about a family-run restaurant! The town was mostly deserted - most people take day trips from Lima and don't really stay the night.

The next morning, we were served breakfast on our own, confirming we were the sole guests. Star treatment! Apparently early May is just the start of tourist season and many people don't stay overnight in Paracas. Breakfast was the typical bread and jam, eggs, and an all-fruit smoothie. "No hielo!" they always told us. ("No ice!")

Here we spotted our first earthquake signs - telling you where it's safe to be during an earthquake. These green signs are all over the place in Peru. Thankfully we were not in the area where they had one during our trip!

After breakfast we headed down to the docks to meet up with our tour group. We ended up on a boat with a bus of tourists who arrived that morning with their own guide who assisted with translations on the boat. Before they allow you to go onto the dock, you have to pay two fees (or bribes, as A likes to joke. Well, he's half mostly serious.).

One is to be on the dock itself and one is for the Islas Ballestas park entrance. There were about 30 people on our speedboat.

On the way to the islands we passed the candela geoglyph. Very interesting to speculate what it means and why it was put there about 2000 years ago. One theory: It's a cactus symbolizing the dry area. They only get rain on the coast around every 20-25 years. Yes, seriously.

Then on to the islands themselves. As we approached, they started to loom up out of the misty fog.

Beautiful islands in themselves, then as we got closer we started to see they were covered in birds. With all those birds comes tons of guana. They harvest it every 7 years to convert into fertilizer.

We got even closer and started to see the sea lions on the rocks. And penguins!

The skipper got us very close to multiple groups of sea lions (within 10 feet!). It was a really awesome sight.

After we got back to the mainland we grabbed a fish sandwich as a snack, picked up our bags from the hotel and caught another Cruz del Sur bus to Nasca.

Coming up next: Nasca - Where did the lines come from? How do you grow plants in the desert? "Do you see the mummy?"