It’s safe to say that, by now, we’ve had more than our fill of night buses in South America. Thankfully, the one from Puno to Arequipa was the last one we’d have to endure as our journey to Huacachina, nearly 400km to the north, featured the ever so slightly less tedious prospect of a 12-hour day bus. Far from being done to save my heavily strained circadian rhythms though, this seems simply to be a result of timetabling constraints imposed by the need to get buses back up to Lima as quickly as possible.

But anyway, whilst the nuances of trans-continental transport logistics may be of interest to me, I doubt anyone else cares. Least of all Katy, who stood in the courtyard of Flying Dog hostel at 5:45am stewing over the need to be up for a 5:15am pickup which, of course, did not happen at 5:15am. We’ve resigned ourselves to the fact that Peru runs on GMT (Greenwich Maybe Time), but we still haven’t managed to work out how exactly anything is able to function when there is such a lackadaisical approach to time-keeping. Perhaps this was just more irksome this time because every minute that passed was another minute that we had unnecessarily dragged ourselves out of bed.

Shortly before 6am, our guide turned up at the hostel and escorted us to our bus for journey ahead, a single-deck, semi-cama coach. Fine for a day-time trip, but as we got on, the bus was still offloading very cranky, sleep deprived Hopsters  (‘Hopsters’ being the collective noun for Peru Hop customers that the company insists on using at every opportunity, Marketing’s invisible hand is slowly working its magic in Peru) who had just arrived after a 10 hour overnight ride from Cusco. Poor sods.

The bus made its way through the streets of Arequipa, picking up and dropping off passengers as it went, including our Kiwi friends from the Colca Canyon tour. Our guide for this leg of our journey was a young, curly haired and fresh-faced Peruvian called Joao, who was surprisingly enthusiastic for someone who had was slap-bang in the middle of a 22-hour shift. After a quick pit-stop at a garage just outside of the city, Jaoa handed out a packed breakfast to each of us and sent a menu round for our lunch for later in the day. Breakfast consumed, we bedded ourselves in for the first leg of our journey to the small coastal town of Chala.

On top of not screwing up your sleep patterns for several days, the day busses have the advantage of giving you something to look at. After leaving Arequipa the bus descended quickly through the Peruvian Desert, a patchwork of red and brown chasm and vegetationless golden dunes stretching uninterrupted as far as the eye can see. 3 hours after our departure we dropped down through a deep, rocky ravine following a dried up river bed which led us down to on to a large roundabout overlooking the Pacific where we joined Route 1, the Peruvian stretch of the Pan-American Highway. Despite its lofty title, the road is a poorly maintained single carriageway which meanders along the clifftops overlooking the sea, providing an exciting rallying opportunity for our driver who had a keen interest in the back-ends of the numerous trucks on the road

We headed north for a further 4 hours, arriving at Chala at about 2pm where we were treated to a surprisingly pleasant lunch of fresh Ceviche and Fried Trout in a sea-front restaurant. After a short break we boarded the bus again and headed inland through the Nazca desert, one of the driest in the world and home of the renowned Nazca Lines. The southern end of the desert is a baron, sandy plain which stretches from the coast to the foothills of the Andes about 30 miles inland.

After heading through Nazca City, we worked our way through the rocky northern section of the Nazca desert which is covered in a layer of deep-red oxide coated rock and sand atop of a greyish subsoil. It’s this area of the desert which hosts the Nazca lines, a network of enormous glyphs, figures and anamorphic shapes up to 370m long. The lines were created by the Nazca civilisation roughly 1500 years ago, each consisting of trench about half a foot deep dug through the top-soil. Even today it is not fully clear why or how the lines were created, and theories range from the more rational – they were religious symbols drawn to appease the gods – to the stupid – they were landing pads for alien spacecraft. Today, with the exception of a depiction of a lizard which had a Highway ploughed through it, and a depiction of a hummingbird permanently scarred by idiots from Greenpeace, the lines are remarkably similar to how they were when first constructed; preserved naturally by the arid conditions and surprisingly consistent temperature and humidity in this costal desert.

The Nazca lines are dotted around the desert over an area of about 20 square miles, and the only way to see them properly is from the air by taking a bi-plane out of Nazca or Ica. The tour operators who offer these flights are poorly regulated though, and fatal crashes involving tourists are all too frequent, so we opted instead to stick with the free trip Peru Hop do to one of the viewing towers overlooking the site. It was pretty late in the day when we got to the viewing tower and there was quite a large queue of tourists waiting their turn to climb to the top. As the sun set it was our turn to climb, making it to the top to look over the lines with just enough time to spare before the light faded too much. From our vantage point we could see the tree, the hand/frog/thing and the Lizard, cut in two by the road. Along with the zoomorphic shapes we could see numerous other lines and large geometric shapes stretching off in to the distance. It was really cool to see these lines up close and to get a sense of their scale, but to be perfectly honest they are best off appreciated in a photo gallery where you can see them in their entirety. Its impressive that the ancient Nazca people pulled off drawing these huge shapes without being able to see them from above though.

The sun set across the desert as we set off again for the final few hours of our drive to Huacachina, the small Oasis just outside the city of Ica. We arrived about 8:30 in the evening and were dropped off in a large, sparsely developed plot of land about halfway between Ica and Huacachina where we checked ourselves in to the Huacachina Desert Hotel.  A little confusingly the hotel didn’t have a sign outside, so we ended up ringing on the door of the only building in roughly the right location. Luckily this turned out to be the right place and we found ourselves in an exceptionally pleasant, clean and well laid out little hotel with a pool, a kitchen which was free for guests to use, a bar and dining area and a 2-story block of 10 rooms at the back. After a long day of being on a bus we were fully ready for bed so stuck on the industrial size fan the room was equipped with and went to sleep.

The following day we woke to gorgeous sunshine, blazing heat and huge sand dunes towering over the walls around our hotel. Ica and Huacachina are on the edge of a vast sandy desert filled with towering dunes, it’s the picture postcard image of the typical desert you might imagine as a child. But having not been able to see the dunes when we arrived the previous night seeing their imposing presence so close caught us by surprise. We’d earmarked the day to be a relaxing one where we didn’t get up to much so after a quick trip to a supermarket we spent the rest of the day lounging by the pool reading and taking the occasional dip. It’s a hard life all this travelling.

Monday rolled in and we spent another morning and early afternoon being rather unproductive, before setting off to Huacachina for the Dune Buggy and Sand Boarding tour we had booked on to with Peru Hop. We walked the 20 minutes or so to Huacachina through the sandy verges of the road until we dropped down the short hill in to the Oases. Huacachina is a small lagoon surrounded on 3 sides by restaurants and hotels with the 4^th side being a sandy beach stretching straight onto a dune. The permanent residency is only about 100 people with the whole town geared up solely for tourism. We’d heard before arriving that Huacachina was a bit of a dive and a tourist trap but were pleasantly surprised to find that, whilst certainly not the world’s most amazing place, the lagoon and its surroundings are really quite pleasant. A wide, bench-laden stone promenade lined with trees and rustic Parisian-style streetlamps encircles most of the lagoon, the town is clean and the restaurants and shops overlooking the promenade are pretty much what you’d expect to find in any tourist district in South America.

We got to the meeting point about 3pm along with around 150 other ‘hopsters’ and were slowly and chaotically organised (there’s no translation for this word in Peruvian Spanish) in to groups before being led up on to the dunes and assigned to a buggy. The sand buggies are large, open sided vehicles with broad, deeply grooved wheels, huge suspension springs and a reassuringly beefy roll cage all around the passenger compartment. The seats are arranged in 3 rows of 3 in a stadium like layout with the front seats nice and low down towards the centre of gravity. Katy and I ended up in the front seat with the driver and the gear stick stuck in to Katy’s leg.

Our seatbelts as tight as we could make them, the driver jumped in, turned over the engine which coughed up a plume of sand from its previous adventure and we were on our way, steadily heading out of the make-shift car park and up to a small control point where our driver handed over our entry tickets to a customs officer of some description. Only the Peruvians – a people with an incredible imagination for arbitrary taxes – would bother to have a ticket control point to entre a desert. It was like the scene in Blazing Saddles where there is a single toll gate in the middle of the Utah desert and nothing to prevent you going around it. Once through the control point the driver stamped on the throttle and the buggy bolted up the massive dune in front of us and Katy, as if physically linked to the throttle pedal, dug her hands in to my leg and buried her head in my shoulder.

The buggy tore over the sand at break-neck speed, bouncing over bumps and hurtling down the valleys between the dunes. I loved it. Katy hated it. The driver, a big jolly fellow who had enough confidence in his own driving to not wear his seatbelt seemed to get off on the screams of the gringos, finding particular amusement in the moment Katy grabbed his leg as we went down the side of an especially steep dune. After 20 minutes or so of bombing around we congregated with a group of other buggies atop a trio of ridges to do some sand boarding. The driver handed out the boards from an open storage cage at the back of the buggy (somehow, they hadn’t been flung free) and we took it in turns sliding head first down the dunes. Piloting the board took a little bit of skill and there were more than a few who took a tumble on the way down, but the forgivingly soft dunes ensured that nobody suffered anything worse than a grazed knee and a mouth full of sand.

After taking on the 3 smaller dunes the driver took us to the top of the tallest dune for miles around and we had the more daunting prospect of a much longer and steeper run. Katy and one of our fellow buggy buddies (I know! I should have thought of that sooner as well!) egged each other on to go down. Another smaller dune and then a final really steep dune later we were done, but not before I managed to fall off on the last slope, diving shoulder first in to the dune and completely smothering myself in sand. The sun was setting as we made our way back to Huacachina where Katy had decided that after our ordeal, we needed a sizeable amount of booze to soothe our frayed nerves (for the record, I didn’t, but I wasn’t going to argue). We headed to a restaurant down on the shore of the lagoon and made full use of the happy hour specials. Several beers and cocktails later, we got back to our hotel and decided that the best way to get all the sand out of our hair, ears, toes and all the other places sand can get to when you’ve spent the day sliding through it on your stomachs, was to go for a late night swim.

Our final day in Huacachina was an early start as we’d booked ourselves on to a tour of El Catador vineyards just to the north of Ica. The region of Ica is renowned for its Pisco production, regarded by many as the best in the country. At El Catador they still make the Pisco using the traditional production methods developed during the colonial era. The grapes used for Pisco are descendants of the grapes originally brought across by the Spanish in the 16^th century when they began setting up vineyards for wine production. The hot, dry conditions in Ica cause the grapes to grow small and sweet, the high sugar level making them produce very sweet wine (way too sweet for the export market but popular here) and also makes them perfect for distilling in to the much, much more potent Pisco, typically between 40% and 45% proof. After a brief tour around the production facilities we were led down in to a basement bar for an opportunity to sample the products of the vineyard. We sampled the Rose and a couple of Whites produced on site, all of which were too sweet for our taste, as well as 3 varieties of Pisco including a creamy liquor made with maca root that tasted surprisingly like Baileys. Sampling complete we merrily staggered back on to the bus and headed back to our hotel to spend the rest of the afternoon again lounging by the pool, letting the effects of the Pisco steadily wear off.

For a renowned tourist trap, Huacachina had proven rather pleasant and we enjoyed our time there a lot more than we had expected to. We were sad to leave our lovely little Hotel the following afternoon to make the next leg of our journey with Peru Hop to Paracas, a small coastal resort on the other side of the desert built around the bay formed by the large, mushroom shaped Paracas Peninsula. We arrived in the early evening and headed to our hotel in what had been described by one of the reviews as being ‘in the ghetto’ (presumably by someone who had never been to a developing country before, by local standards it was a perfectly normal street). Hungry, we headed out to one of the restaurants recommended by our Peru Hop guide, a 5^th floor rooftop fish restaurant which received our business only because we were hungry and didn’t know until we were up there how expensive it was. That’s how they get you.

An underwhelming meal later we headed back to our hotel where we both had a terrible night’s sleep owing to the noisy fan and plastic mattress protector which we had to unpeel ourselves from every few hours. Ho Hum. At least we were only staying there for 1 night owing to it being the Easter weekend and every hotel in Paracas being full.

We woke up involuntarily early the next day and trudged down for breakfast, groggy and irritable. We did at least have something to look forward to though, a boat trip out to Islas Ballestas Nature reserve, a small chain of islands about 10km off shore that hosts thousands of sea birds including pelicans, cormorants and humboldt penguins as well as being a breeding ground for sea lions. We spent about an hour on the boat working our way around the island and watching the mass of wildlife, the highlight being the infant Sea Lions only a few weeks old frolicking in the water on the gravelly beaches. The mass of wildlife on the rocks was incredible and as we made our way back to shore a vast swarm of blue footed boobies (lol, boobies) was making its way back to the island from a fishing expedition, all flying in formation close enough that they appeared almost like a black blanket floating across the sky.

Back on land we went for a spot of lunch at a small bar that served the tastiest smoothies ever in giant glasses shaped like fish bowls. Our adventures for the day continued with a bus ride around Paracas National Reserve, a national park covering the Paracas Peninsular as well as a small stretch of desert further inland. The bus stopped at several vantage points overlooking the sea and the rest of the reserve as it worked its way back up the coast. Not a great deal to see, but the sparseness of the landscape has its own charm and the jagged rocks along the sea front had the familiar feel of the Dorset coast, albeit without the vegetation.

Our short tour finished and we headed back to Paracas to board our final Peru Hop bus, a 5-hour ride to Lima, stopping en-route at Tambo Colorado, a set of Inca Ruins named for the red colour the buildings were painted, some of which can still be seen today. The site is a large and fairly impressive complex used, rather mundanely, as an administrative outpost overseeing the coastal trade routes.

The sun set as we left Tambo Colorado, setting too on the final stretch of our South American adventure. Next time it rose, we’d be back in Lima with just over a week to go before flying home.