I missed my flight. That´s literally how my trip started. My mother drove like she had a lead foot and I sprinted to my gate but I still missed my flight. After arguing with the woman at the front desk that YES I could run across an airport in ten minutes,
give me the ticket. She finally did but I was too late for check in, which meant that the two pocket knives my dad insisted I take with me, because, I don´t know, something about his daughter touring south america alone worried him, earned me a thorough security search. Fortunately the rest of the trip went fine, I did have to sprint to make my next flight in Houston but I made it!
Lima smelled like India, but was much cleaner. Lima is actually in the middle of a desert that meets the pacific. It´s hot and humid and smells really strongly like the ocean. It reminds me a lot like Delhi with the modern buildings right next to shacks with broken windows and laundry hanging from the roofs. The ocean is actully very cold for south america, great for the heat, but seeing a garbage truck dump into it killed any thought of swimming. It was really odd for me to see nothing but desert even though it was right next to the ocean and very humid. Do I have any geology or geography friends that could explain that to me? The people in town are nice, and I think used to seeing foreigners, I went for a walk by the beach with Daniel and Tara and none of them stared. Lima is beautiful, it has a lot of older, historical architecture from the Spanish and even though it´s in the middle of the desert it´s very lush. I met the rest of my tour group, who are all about my age and dominantly Australian excluding Gen from Japan, Tara from Canada, and Daniel from the states. They are all about 5+ years older than me, something I think I was doing a good job of hiding UNTIL my mother contacted the hotel I was staying at. Both the hotel staff and the guide were so impressed she was able to track me down, they announced it twice. We left Lima in the afternoon and drove into Nazca at midnight. The desert here is just soft, vast sand, that extends all the way to the ocean. I don´t know how people are able to survive. But they do, we drove by huge shack towns that had been built into the sides of the dunes.
I had originally thought that Nazca would be boring, except for the lines I hadn´t really heard anything else about it. It´s a relatively small town that seems pretty reliant on tourist income. Again, nothing but desert. In the morning we drove out in a buggy to this massive sand dune (not the biggest in the world, but we could see that one in the distance) for sand boarding. FUN. I´ve been chomping on grains of sand ever since. These dunes are huge, and sliding down them on board is a little terrifying. If Michelle or anyone else from girls camp remembers that time we slid down dunes in San Luis Obispo magnify that dune by 100. We passed by Incan cemeteries, which were pretty much piles of white bone left out in the sun for further bleaching. We also passed by a temple, all of it´s 24 kilometers buried except for one pyramid. Peru is on a massive fault line so after large earthquake killed many of the Incas they buried the temple and left. We´re going to see the Nazca lines tonight, and then eat a dinner that´s been cooked underground. The word feast, was thrown around a lot and I really hope it´s true. Our guide Veronica and my guide book promised I´d get fat here but I don´t see how that´s possible. Sorry if my post seems a little stiff, I´ve been around Aussies for the past couple of days and am pretty proud of myself for not using the word ¨stodgy¨.
-Kita
