PeruSouth America

Feliz Día del Padre

By June 21, 2015 No Comments

Boat ride to Ballestas Islands Dune buggy ride My great attempt at sand boarding The Huacachina oasis

Feliz dia del padre is Spanish for Happy Father’s Day! I thought this was the most appropriate thing I could write because as I speak I am in the Peru jungle and my sense of travel and adventure was instilled upon me by my father.

With the many trips he took us on, we learned to find the hidden treasures (waking up in the middle of a field, w/o a tent, in Brice Canyon with deer 20 feet from us), rolling with what came our way (I am not sure he really knew where we were sleeping each night until he had a room key in hand), and still marveling at the big name tourist attractions (the boat ride to a glacier and Mt Rushmore come to mind). If it was not for my father who know where I would be, but I can tell you it would not be in Peru.

With that said let me tell you tell you about my week. I started off boarding a bus with a company called Peru Hop, which I can not say enough good things about!!!! The first day we stopped at Paracas and I got a tour of the Paracas National Reserve. this is a peninsula  on the west coast which is desert. In fact it seems like the entire coast was a desert. The landscape was ruggedly beautiful. The next morning I took a boat ride out to see the Ballestas Islands, which are called the little Galapagos because I saw penguins and sea lions (I will be posting these as “Photos Of The Day” this week so look for them). This tour was fantastic and I loved seeing the little penguins.

We then boarded the bus and went to Haucuchina, which is a true oasis in the middle of the  desert. There was even a lagoon. The favorite activity here is to hire a dune buggy to take you zooming up and over the sand dunes and then “sand boarding” down them (I will try and post a video of it on Saturday). I really dug this oasis, but two things I did not realize at the time were first the boarding was in six different short sections instead of one long run all the way down. Of course this is obviously a good thing for me as you can tell by the photo. the other thing is that from the photos I had seen I thought this was in the middle of no where, but the reality is that there is a biggish town right over a small dune.

The third day I took a public bus down in order to take a plane ride and see the Nazca Lines ( I will write more on Tuesday about this). This was a big thing for me since these are football field size carving in the desert floor and are around 1400 years old. Way cool! After the 40 minute flight around I started the trek back up to Lima for my flight out to the jungle, which I will write about next week along with my upcoming visit to Machu Picchu on Tuesday.

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