Board In Peru

Over the past couple of days we have travelled south along the Peruvian coast, stopping at Pisco, home of Peru's national drink - Pisco Sour (Pisco brandy, lemon juice, bitters and egg whites) - yesterday and Nasca today. The countryside around here is far from what one might expect to find on the coast in the tropics; instead of lush forests it's a desert moonscape, with sand dunes and rocks as far as the eye can see.

Yesterday we visited the Ballestas islands, also sometimes referred to as "the poor man's Galapagos" due to its sheer rock faces and abundance of bird life (especially cormorants and boobies). There were also a large number of sea lions (one of the highlights of the tour being when surprised a pair in the middle of a "Barry White moment") lounging about on the rocks. The islands are also renowned for having been one of the main centres for guano harvesting at the start of the 20th century (the industry is still carried out on a small scale to this day). Guano used to be a major natural resource and was exported all over the world to be used as fertilizer due to its high nitrogen content until a chemical process of nitrate production was developed. As such the odour of the islands was rather overpowering for some (there's so much bird shit about that the islands are surrounded by a barrier of floating white foam).

Today required an early start to head off to a local oasis and go sandboarding in the surrounding desert. The sandboards were pretty basic, being little more than planks of wood with straps, but the experience was very enjoyable. Manoeuvring was nigh-on impossible and so you are pretty much restricted to going straight downhill. So after seeing that that was the case I decided not to bother with bindings and standing up and just went down on my belly, which turned out to be far more satisfying (and not to mention faster as well). We even had chauffeur driven dune buggies to ferry us from one dune to the next, so there was no tiring traipsing up dunes either. The only drawback was that by the end each and every one of us was completely covered in sand, which has a nasty habit of getting into crevices you never even knew you had! 8 hours, a swim and a shower later and I'm still extracting sand from my ears.

Later on we travelled down to Nasca, famed for a series of pre-Hispanic geoglyphs (the images are mainly geometric but also include images of a monkey, a condor, a spider and a "spaceman" amongst others) drawn into the surrounding desert (known as the Nazca Lines). The shapes are huge (between 50 and 100 metres in length) and have remained intact for over 1500 years due to the unique climate of the valley. But probably the most mysterious thing about the lines is the fact that they can only be properly viewed from the air (from the ground it is impossible to recognise them from the rest of the desert landscape). To find out more about them and to see some good pictures check out the follwing site .