TravellingStrom

Friday – Nazca, Peru

Amazing how I can change my mind, it must be the inner women in me 🙂

I was already awake, but later than normal when Graham knocked to say bye, they were heading to Nazca. I mentioned about heading due east from Lima to Cusco and he said it is mostly dirt and bad roads, so when we checked on his more detailed map, it looked like I may need to go down to Nazca after all if I wanted to stay on decent roads. I decided right then that I would head south as well, and Graham said they would wait if I wanted to ride with them, so that is what I did, a quick pack, and a few photos of the wild life living in the hotel upstairs near the breakfast room.

Then we had the crap traffic to negotiate to get out of the city. The only reason I had stayed here was to do tyres if I could and had found out on the HUBB that they are a bitch to find in this city, so that meant this stop inside the central area was a waste of time. Never mind, after an hour of traffic, road works etc we found the PanAm Sur and stopped for breakfast at a small side stand 🙂

Now, once again thanks to SanDiegoLisa we had tea, because although we had ordered tea, all we got was hot water and sugar and milk, hmmmm, thanks Lisa 🙂 After that we followed the coast south sometimes through sand dunes sometimes a mixture of green oasis areas with surrounding sand dunes and not to mention the side wind, that is a constant. We grabbed some fuel a bit later before climbing some headlands and bluffs where the view was nice, except for the thousands of chook farms lining the road, they were a bit on the nose! Then onwards and eventually stopping for lunch around one or so at a small shack style food joint, but the food was good 🙂

After lunch it was more of the same, although due to some traffic I was separated for a while from G&S, but as I was stuck behind a line of trucks which they managed to pass earlier, I took a movie of a normal passing manoeuvre down here, basically take a chance because of you don’t, you will be stuck for ages, lucky the road shoulders are hard eh 🙂

After a quick environmental stop, I managed to catch up to G&S again and then some more windy desert but we at last saw a sign showing a distance marker for Nazca. One of the things I noticed down in this section was that the road sides were planted with trees, mostly they were still quite young and a lot of them had ropes holding them vertical against the prevailing breeze/gale.

A bit of fun after this as we entered some twisties, it made a change after all the straight bits and it took us down into the Rio Grande valley through some lush agriculture.

Now, here is a funny thing seen quite often on the road, the back of some trucks have these branches placed there, the only thing I can think of for a reason, is that it stops people hitching a ride, but I will endeavour to find out, all I need to do is ask some questions, hey Des 🙂

Well, just a short while after this we found the Nazca lines and there was a small tower where you could climb up and actually see two of the images, a pair of hands and a tree 🙂 Now, as you may recall I was not really interested in going to Nazca for the reasons mentioned previously, but by crikey I was excited to be here and seeing a few of the images was a real bonus 🙂

Of course there were the normal hawkers and artisans around and I was quite happy about that too, a t-shirt and some stickers and a few other things, why not 🙂

We were soon in Nazca and booked into a nice resort type hotel called Don Guache, with secure parking, pool, internet, bar, food and only two blocks from the main plaza, cool stuff 🙂 GPS – S 14 49.891 W 74 56.218

Here we had some beers and met up with Mike and Alana, they are doing the ride on a Ural with sidecar and filming a documentary on marriage, so that could be a fun thing to see later on, in the meantime, their blog could be a fun read, all I need is time!

A bit later on we headed into town for a feed, after chatting with a group of kids who were asking all types of questions. 🙂

After that, I grabbed some beers for the fridge back at the hotel and had a quiet evening sorting out some info on the net. One thing we had organised through the people at the hotel was a flight over the Nazcar lines tomorrow morning at 8am. This is a big turnaround from what I intended, but we had been assured, only us three in the plane and in the morning it should be less bumpy. It was also a cheaper flight at $50 each, so a lot less than the $125 I had heard about. But, I was here now, so why not, it could be fun 🙂

Day – 291 miles and 468 km
Trip – 46,595 miles and 74,987 km

Salud
TravellingStrom

WORLD

Go to top of page