Paracas to Huacahina and beyond!

What an amazing day. It was a packed day to say the least.

Up at 6.45, has breakfast and left for the quayside. We spent the next couple of hours in a boat sailing around the Ballestas Islands.

Along the way we stopped at the Candelabra, which is a giant petroglyph of a San Pedro cactus carved out by the Paracas, a pre Incan civilisation thousands of years old.

Arriving at the islands we were greeted by thousands of cormorants and boobies flocking overhead. Seals and sea lions hung out and sunbathed on the rocks with the pelicans and tiny penguins.

The smell of guano (bird shit) was noticeable but not as bad as we'd read it was. This was highly prized in the early 1900’s as a war broke out between Peru, Bolivia and Chile for the rights to access guano in order to sell it for fertilisers and explosives. It’s strange that bird shit is the reason behind the borders we define today.

We headed straight for the Peruhop bus and set off for the national reserve in Ika. Both Colin and I thought it was strangely bland. We stopped at 3 points to take pics.

We then headed onwards and upwards to Huacahina tiny, one street tourist village in the desert.

We had an hour before heading off for what turned out to be a 2 hour adrenaline rush in the desert in a dune buggy. I've never been so scared and so exhilarated in my life!! It made the big rides at Alton Towers feel like a kids merry-go-round.

Before we got to the buggy station, we had to walk up a dune which nearly killed both of us and we weren't alone. Even the youngsters were flagging. It felt like 1 step forward and 10 backwards.

Our driver, Mikey Max Verstappen was a bloody lunatic. We sat in the front as none of the others (20 something so called adrenaline junkies) wanted to. Colin was in charge of taking videos because I was too busy clinging onto his left leg and telling Mikey I was going to murder him. We managed to make it to the top of one of the big dunes to watch the sunset. We got there as the sun was still whole but just sitting on the horizon. As we're so close to the equator, the sun sank like a stone in no more than a minute and so did the temperature. It became freezing cold as soon as the sun dropped out of view..

As we headed back to base, the buggy came to a standstill with a problem. We were stuck in the desert until one of the other drivers came back to pick us up after he'd dropped off his victims.