Monday 15 December

Monday 15 December

Birds, and a bug

After breakfast, which included a fruit named tuna (juicy and tasty, with lots of seeds) we walked down to the harbour to take a boat trip. We enjoyed some Peruvian queue management techniques, which involved us standing in single file in different locations (we thought the operators were on work experience), and were led to the kind of boat that you would use if you operated a drug smuggling operation.

Surrounded by excitable Chinese girls, we headed out, first to view the Paracas candelabra, drawn into the side of a large sand dune. Similar to the chalk white horses in England and maybe from the same time - this was 2500 years old and, although obviously fragile, hadn't been damaged by wind.

The Ballestas Islands were small islands a couple of km from land, with impressive rock bridge formations. They were breeding grounds for various species of bird, especially the Inca tern, pelican, cormorants, boobies, Humboldt penguins and the Turkey Vulture - all making a spectacular show, especially the boobies, diving straight down into the water to fish in the same way as gannets. Some sea-lion families basked in the sun with their babies - I didn't quite get the difference between seals and sea lions, but these looked smaller and cuter. You could see the guano harvesting stations with wooden cranes that were used to lower the guano cargo on to boats.

We got back to land and headed south, to the town of Ica, where we stopped first at a Pisco winery. Pisco is Peruvian brandy, often drunk with lime as a sour cocktail. Our guide, Miguel, had the best job in the world, and gave us five or six varieties to taste after a tour of the Pisco making area, all made with traditional wooden tools and matured in old clay pots before distillation.

Reluctantly we dragged ourselves into town,and went into a small but fascinating archaeological museum. We saw the history of earlier civilisations, shown through archaeological finds such as mummies, buried with treasures such as pots,and covered with four or five layers of blankets. Some of the skulls showed how certain people would have their heads shaped deliberately to have different forms, stretched for example, if they were going to be priests. And we saw the traces of skull surgery, which was used to expunge evil spirits.

After that it was time to get some lunch and we popped into a large supermarket and admired the local produce, like ears of black sweetcorn. We picked up some salami and Andean cheese, with some huge grapes and apricots, all of which we snacked on in the bus as we headed south again.

South of Ica the landscape became even more barren and arid, broken up occasionally by a set of hairpin bends,  leading into a valley and a dusty town. It never rains around here.

Unfortunately Sion had eaten something that disagreed with him (oh no, it didn't!), and as he went to the front of the bus,he fainted. Luckily he was saved by Jesus (our second driver, not the son of God, but who knows...?) who caught him as he fell. We stopped in the shade in a little village where Wilfred, our group leader, administered some Peruvian tonic into his nose and brought some colour back to his face. The rest of the group waited patiently and chatted in the shade.

Our hotel was an old hacienda that had been converted into a hotel about ten years ago. It was beautiful, with fruit trees around the courtyard, two peacocks, and a pet vicuña and an alpaca, both of which looked lovely from the distance but turned out to have bad tempers. The vicuña would collect the saliva into its mouth before spitting, a fine spray which we saw - but mostly ducked - a few times. As we drank a beer before dusk, the vicuña came to join us, chewing cushions on the seats by the bar.