I'M AT: Casa de Arena, Huanchaco - $5, a blinding laugh with a young crowd, poolside bar and nightly barbeque with free jugs of Pisco Sour, hot sun and lots and lots of sand. AND La Estrella del Sur, Nazca - $7 including a breakfast that I was never able to enjoy, and to be honest a bit of a dump.
Directly south of Lima is a fucking huge desert.
It's frighteningly inhospitable, but still folk live there, in dusty towns without water, eking out a living somehow. The bus ploughed through massive hills of sand as we pulled into Haunchaco.
It's a real-life oasis in the midst of all the dust, situated round a big green lake with reeds and birds and stuff, boats for hire. Palms sweep round in a curve, five trees or so deep, and then the desert begins again. A picture of Huanchaco's on the back of the 50 sol note, the most widely-counterfeited note in circulation here.
The hostal was great, and dead relaxed after the aching cool of Lima. We walked into some kind of paradise, with tanned or tanning bodies lolling round a swimming pool, or sitting at the bar, music belting out, laughter, a little miracle. Groups of people were walking up the huge sand dunes that tower over the hostal, and the sun was setting. So after a nip round town, gazing at the bright dune buggies, and a beer with a Peruvian guy that supported Brazil, we went back for the barbie, all chicken and burgers and avocadoes, tomatoes, potato salad, buns, pisco sours, cuba libres, the works, and had a great time getting pissed to Reggaeton with the people we met, Katarina, Daniella, Rachel and a posse of geezers from Sacramento.
Next day, fuzzy head and up and out for a zip round the dunes, our dunebuggy driver the colour of a burnt log, the buggy itself huge with three rows of padded seats, rusty buckles, rollbars overhead and a very loud engine. The ride was great - coming to rest after a dune climb, then tipping over, gears shifting, g-force rollercoaster of a dusty, windy sand blur. And all there was was sky and sand and empty water bottles.
And then the boarding itself, boards waxed with red goo, spinning, slipping, falling over into the hotly yielding sand, no balance, those around gliding like seals across the yellow surface, before on the final big dune I found some momentum and glided seal-like myself. My pockets were full of sand.
Less than 24 hours after we'd arrived at Haunchaco we left for Nazca, which turned out to be a sharp trap of a town.
The only good thing about the place was a terrific planetarium and lecture on the history and theories surrounding the Nazca lines, for which the town is famous and which were etched into the stone surface of the desert over a period of 700 years - lines, dead straight, some 10km long, but also geometric shapes, and animals, spirals, haloes of design everywhere.
No-one's sure what they were - calling cards for spacemen, running tracks for ancient Olympics, irrigation channels, representations of the stars. The lecture gave more questions than answers. But the guy running the show was fascinating, and he'd set up a telescope so we could see the moons of Jupiter and a real close-up of the full moon overhead after the show had finished.
So, all ready, we hit the airport for an organised tour the next morning, everyone who'd been at the barbie in Huanchaco plus a guy we met just before we left, Jan - and it was all such a great disappointment. We went off four hours late, despite being told every half hour that our flight was just about ready.
It was hot at the airfield and there was nothing to do, and we couldn't eat because we were told we'd all be heartily sick if we did so before the flight, so we all missed breakfast and gradually wilted. Then the tour guy insulted all the Germans in our group, his eyes darting with malice, and stung us for the 'airport tax'.
The flight itself eventually left at midday, with the sun directly overhead and no shadows cast, and it was really difficult to make out any of the shapes properly, apart from the 'spaceman' etched into the side of a mountain. The spaceman was just a bloke with an oddly-shaped head. Then my hands went numb. 20 minutes later we'd returned safely to Earth.
It was good being up there and all, at 2,400 feet, seeing the shadow cast by our small 5-seater cessna as it dipped and banked over the desert, but really, after seeing the lecture and all of the very impressive photography on all the brochures, our expectations were such that the flight could never have matched them. As such we all trooped off of the plane, a bit glum, and headed off to find some food.
Nazca drained me of money and enthusiasm and I was very glad to leave.
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