August 27, 2018 – August 29, 2018
Huacachina is a tiny, oasis resort town surrounded by huge sand dunes. It was once the playground for elite Peruvians, but is now frequented more by tourists who rent snowboards or skis to first climb up, then swoosh their way down the sand dunes. We stopped in town for some lunch and watched boarders climb the enormous sand dunes in the hot midday sun, we didn’t see many coming back down though; maybe they were reluctant to climb back up again. After lunch we decided to move on.
The lagoon in the middle of town.
Adventurers on the horizon of the sand dune.
At Nazca, we paid a couple of dollars to climb an observation tower next to the highway from where you can get a look at a couple of the nearby Nazca lines/drawings. We had decided that we were not going to do the traditional flight over the lines, so this was our chance to get a glimpse of what they were like. The lines are shrouded in mystery. No one knows for sure why they were made or who made them. Many theories exist. Did aliens make the lines? Were they made by humans to worship their gods? Were they walkways, or a calendar? The lines are almost imperceptible from the ground and can only be truly appreciated from above, which adds to the mystery of how the enormous figures were drawn so accurately.
Still smiling.
The Nazca lines span an area of about 500 square kilometres. The lines were made by removing the dark, sun baked surface stones to expose the whiter soil beneath. There are hundreds of lines, symbols and animals drawn on the surface of the Pampa Colorado, and they may have been here for more than 2,500 years. They were only “discovered” by the outside world in 1939 when a North American scientist flew over the area.
It was hard to photograph the lines from the tower. This one is called “the tree” with the roots kind of visible at the top left.
This is “hands”, or “frog”, or “bird”.
We left Nazca early the next day, having decided to drive as much of the twelve hour drive to Cusco as we could that day, in order to make a shorter drive the next day for our arrival in Cusco…we wanted to be fresh to tackle the traffic through the city to our campsite.
The drive to Cusco takes you up and over high altitude passes and the landscape changes dramatically as you drive inland.
Desert mountains turned into grasslands, which turned into high altitude meadows. Then the road dropped down into a canyon and there were red rock cliffs and a huge rushing river. Then back up and over high passes. We saw our first roadside snow of the trip, albeit just traces that had not yet melted from the previous night.
Vicunas the beautiful smaller relative of llamas and alpacas.
We saw lots of remnant walls and stone fences in the countryside.
Andean woman. They use swaths of beautifully woven cloth to carry everything from babies to groceries to stacks of firewood on their backs.
Alpacas in front of a multi-hued mountain.
LOVE these guys! Look at those faces! I believe the coloured yarn in their ears is to identify who owns a particular animal.
Stacked rock walls enclose large corrals on the hillside.
We saw thousands of alpacas and sheep on the drive sometimes with the less domesticated vicunas also grazing nearby.
About to zig zag back down into a canyon, part of our road appears in the lower middle section of the picture.
Nearing Cusco….Machu Picchu lies somewhere behind these peaks!