We left Huaraz in style paying double the price for the luxurious Cruz del Sur bus. This bus company definitely gave us everything it promised (security, lunch, movies, bingo), but a bus ride is always uncomfortable. A little nervous about arriving in Lima after all the nasty rumours, we were happy to have the added security they offered. I laughed as the metal detector gate we had to go through and the corresponding wand held by a security guard beeped like mad whenever anyone went through. We were all waved by without a second thought. When my backpack beeped a security guard simply felt the outside of it, knowing by feel I suppose the difference between grenades and avocadoes, explosives and windpipes, guns and toys.

After hearing of the atrocities of Lima, I was pleasantly surprised - although I was watching Star Wars: Attack of the Clones while we were going through the many shantytowns in the north of Lima. During the two days we spent there the sun hung suspended in the sky by either smog, dust, cloud or a mixture of the three.

Riot police and their tank

We stayed with Jon and Celia who have been teaching at an international school in La Molina for the last five years. Expecting a small apartment with a couple of thermarests on the living room floor, we were so excited to stay in their lovely house with our own room and all the comforts of home! Jon brought us on a tour of Waldo´s - a massive supermarket similar to a Superstore or Wal-mart where we even did some free wine tasting before heading out for drinks. While it sounds odd to give a tour of a supermarket, one really is astounded by it after travelling in a third world country and only buying what is available in tiny market stalls.

In the Plaza de Armas we watched as several riot police congregated on a corner accompanied by a tank whose front bumper was curiously painted with menacing fangs. Perhaps they were preparing crowd control for the fiesta that seemed to erupt around the Monastery of San Francisco. Inside the courtyard a circle formed around traditionally dressed masked men and women that danced to live music. At first we thought it was a funeral procession, but what we thought was a coffin was actually a bust of San Francisco floating down the street followed by a large crowd including the dancers and musicians.

Creepy!

As San Francisco rounded the corner, we entered his monastery. The catacombs beneath the monastery that hold the remains of over 70,000 people are impressive - but even more creepy than that fact alone was the conservationists´ idea to rearrange their bones. After passing by a trough of neatly stacked femers, we´d round a corner to find a room brimming with thousands of pelvic bones. A circular well became a perfect frame for an intricate design of femers and skulls. The dry, dank and narrow passageways contain grates in the low ceilings offering the deceased great vantage points for the baroque-moorish designs of the cathedral above. These lucky souls can attend every mass until the end of eternity!

Miraflores is the area where tourists are meant to go. It is full of art shops, bars, cafes and restaurants that line the streets all the way to the water. Looking out onto the vast expanse of the pacific, we were lulled into a trance as we sipped our overpriced beers and the tide pushed thousands of tiny rocks onto the beach and and then slowly pulled them back into the sea ad infinitum. As we finished our beers we watched the surfers and decided against going to McDonalds and Tony Romas, we had to remind ourselves that we were on a different continent.

After a lazy afternoon, we said goodbye to Jon and Celia and the comforts of their home and hit the road again... this time for the oasis of Huacachina. We arrived after dark and were so hungry that we went to the nearest place for dinner. The arrival of Brett´s spaghetti bolognese was preceded by the ding of a microwave and mine came exactly ten minutes later and announced with the same familiar sound. It wasn´t our best meal, but at that stage we would have eaten anything.

Poolside oasis

All the rooms in our hostal face the pool and a bar area that blasted out Jack Johnson and reggaton...We joined the party and after asking where the dunes were I felt a lttle silly as the hostal is built on one. Sure enough, when we looked out into the starry night, we could definitley see the steep division between land and sky. The morning sun confirmed that we were in fact completely surrounded by large sand dunes on all sides, the closest flooding in through the back door of the hostal if opened. We were so eager to get our sandboards that we failed to notice that the bottoms were stripped instead of slick and the footing was goofy instead of regular. We also had no wax. After many creative boot strap improvisations and failed descents, I decided to forget traditional sandboarding and plunked my bottom on the back strap and lacing my fingers through the front straps, I flew down the dune with an enormous dust wake behind me. Ascent: 50 minutes. Descent: 45 seconds.

We spent that whole afternoon baking in and round the pool trying to get the sand out of every orface. When we were just about clean, a group of us decided to go up a second time for sunset armed with a couple of good sandboards, beer and two dogs. We felt on top of a different world as the setting sun threw magnificent shadows across miles of desert. After crashing and burning a few more times on the board of no excuses, I decided to run down the dune - each leap stretching to about ten feet - while Brett coasted down on the board attempting a few jumps on the way...

We stopped in Nazca for a few hours before our overnight bus to Cusco. We did not take the flight to see the famous Nazca lines but we did go to a nearby ancient burial ground where the dead were preserved a little more than I would have liked. Over seventy tombs of varying sizes from different cultures were uncovered originally by grave robbers. Some bones still litter the area but most have been neatly rearranged inside the tombs with their traditional dress still intact. More impressive was our tour guide who spouted off mileage between towns, lengths and widths of different burial fabrics, altitudes of different cities in Peru, numbers of different types bananas and potatoes in the Nazca area and any other numeric fact you could possibly think of.

Do we look like tourists?

As I write this in Cusco on the eve of our Macchu Picchu trip the sky grumbles around me and the rain thunders down. Even though we have armed ourselves with all the baby Alpaca material that two tourists could possibly wear, I still feel a little nervous about our four days facing the elements. While I know it will be one of the most amazing experiences of my life, I still can´t help but fear the cold as I struggle to keep warm under the four layers of blankets in our hostal bed.

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