On August 15th, 2007, while I was enjoying a fabulous day of self pampering per usual on my birthday (probably included chipoodles, starbucks, taco bell, etc.) - a big, huge earthquake hit the town of Pisco, Peru hard and the surrounding region of Ica pretty hard. Sadly our stinking book, Moon, was published that same year so it has no knowledge of the earthquake and half the stuff we've been thinking of seeing is now gone - people explaining that it collapsed in the quake. Muy triste! And yes, we're still looking at the Moon book even though we hate it - it's our only guide!
Without knowing all that about the quake, we headed from Lima to Pisco to check out the nearby national reserve of Paracas and it's many wild animals and also to drink the local Pisco Sours - not really given the name from this exact town but we had steaks in Salsbury in the UK so why not keep the trend alive? Plus Jeff likes the sours when they are nice and cold - and I continue to find them revolting.
Pisco sucked. Probably not it's fault, but the place is in shambles and the hostel we were hoping to stay at was lost in the quake. Plan B - let some sleazy salesmen lead us to a different hotel and give us a "good deal for his friends" and stay there two nights. He was kinda annoying and at one point I finally had to tell him to leave because I needed him gone so he said he'd see us downstairs in the lobby to talk about tours later. Looking forward to it. Plan B also included letting him give us a decent price on a tour of Paracas the next day. We only had to waste time until the next morning when our tour left - which is more difficult than you might think in a town reduced to nearly nothing and barely rebuilding itself. Plus we were told numerous times to only stick to the square since the surrounding area wasn't safe. Needless to say, Pisco does not rank high on my favorites of Peru.
Paracas, however, was great! We saw tons of sea lions, a billion and a half birds (including the Peruvian Boobie), Humbolt Penguins (endangered but oh so cute), dolphins!!, and condors (yes, that could have been placed under birds but it was cool anyway). We took a boat tour from Paracas to the Islas Ballestas to see all that wild life (except the condors, that's later) and on the way we saw a huge symbol on the side of a sand dune called Candelabra - an ancient symbol they know nothing about. Just like Stonehenge. They think that maybe, sort of, kind of, perhaps, that school children in ancient BC times or maybe sailors, or who knows.
After the boat ride we toured the desert and learned more about Paracas being a protected area and saw some absolutely beautiful scenes of ocean and desert. Their other pride and joy - the "Cathedral" was a rock formation like a bridge into the water. Sadly, that bridge portion was also lost in the quake. Stinking quake. They still took us to look at it (and made us pay 5 soles) and the view was great. This is also where we saw big condors flying overhead - we'll see bigger in a few weeks in Colca Canyon so don't mind the not so awesome pictures. I'm working on it.
Now we're in Ica and we toured some wineries and bodegas today - and tasted many kinds of wine and pisco sours. I stopped after my first drop of Pisco (stopped the hard stuff, kept trying the wines) because I thought it would be rude to boot all over the kind tour guide's tables. That stuff is potent! They showed us all about how they make wine and pisco and were very kind and finally spoke slow Spanish for us when we pointed out we could understand them if only they'd speak up and slow it down a notch. They speak FAST here and quietly so it helps if they speak up. Plus they speak more castellano here than the espanol from Central America we're used to so words are different (it's more like Spain Spanish here). Interesting.
Tomorrow we're off to see the Nasca Lines - now those will be amazing. You just wait and see the pics I'm going to take! Oh yes!
