Rolo on Tour

How else would I title my last week, which I mostly spent in the desert?
First stop was the little beach town of Paracas in order to visit the Islas Ballestas. They are also called „Galapagos of the poor“ which I think is a great name marketing-wise.
Getting there you pass a thing called the candelabra, which is supposed to have its origin around 200 B.C. What its purpose was is still left to speculation.

Your theory?

Getting to the islands you are suddenly surrounded by lots of birds and sealions.

The big ones are males, the middle-sized one females and the small ones are babies

Occasionally you can also spot some penguins:

Discussing the way to Madagascar?

Next was the Oasis of Huacachina which is surrounded by sand dunes on all sides. What an astonishing view!

Huacachina

The place is also known for its Dunebuggy-/Sandboardingtours and I of course had to try that as well. The Sandboarding turned out to be sledding using a Skeleton technique. Once we stood up on a rather small dune but as nobody had snowboard experience those tries were not that successful to say the least.

The new sandboarding sensation from Germany

And here he is in action

Talking about the dunebuggy I felt quite insecure in it. It was like a rollercoaster ride but with a seatbelt that would fail any security test. Also the intention of the driver seemed to be to risk as much as possible without crashing. To our buggy nothing happened but another one was not that lucky. We saw it flip over during our tour and the next day it came to my notice that the driver of that buggy actually did not survive that accident…
The hostel I stayed in had a Wii gaming console and for the first time ever I got to play Guitar Hero. Kind of nice when you „play“ a guitar solo but it does not have much to do with playing guitar. I wonder how many 10 year old Jimi Hendrixs we would get if they could make a game where you actually had to do the same things as with a guitar.

From Huacachina I went to the city of Nazca in order to take a flight over the Nazca lines. Those are a set of geoglyphs in the desert whose purpose is still unclear. But apparently the price had nearly doubled within the last year, the reason being enforced security regulations after some accidents which occured previously. Considering the experience in Huacachina I had I guess its the right thing to do but anyway I decided to save myself the money. Having relaxed a bit of the various journeys the last days I continued to Arequipa. Lastly some advice: Don´t visit Nazca on sundays. Apparently there is a power failure nearly every sunday.

Arequipa turned out to be one of those cities where you cannot do too much when churches don´t interest you. But interestingly the garbage truck drives around using the ringtone I had on my mobile phone. I wonder how they can bear hearing that the whole day as I would turn crazy at some point I guess.
Arequipa is a good starting point for visiting the Colca Canyon, which is said to be the second deepest canyon in the world (And no, the deepest one is not the Grand Canyon but another one pretty nearby the Colca called Cotahuasi Canyon.). It turned out to be a day of mainly bus rides with a 4 hour-intermezzo at the Canyon waiting for Condors to show up.

El Condor pasa

A way to use waiting time:

Inka-Jenga or as we say in Germany „Einen Steinmenschen bauen“ 😉

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