No power, dubious plumbing & cheap beer.

I suppose it’s something of a cliché that travelling is a wonderful and life changing experience. ’Oh it’s amazing’, you hear people say ‘you’ll have an incredible time, I loved every minute of it’. A suspiciously high proportion of these people though appear to have smoked a little too much weed or read one too many guardian articles (or both…probably both). Truth however is that, unless these people have some perverse love of spending hours and hours in sweaty, cramped vehicles bouncing around on roads and railways of variable quality, what they really mean is that the bits in between travelling are amazing. Travelling itself is a tedious necessity that bookends the ‘incredible time’ with a lengthy intermission of boredom punctuated by occasional acute frustration.

Our last day in Chiang Mai had sadly proven to be a bit of a right-off owing to my finally succumbing to the consequences of my adventurous palate. We had intended to visit Doi Suthep, supposedly a very pleasant temple complex on the hills over-looking the city, but alas it wasn’t to be. Ah well. If there’s one thing South East Asia isn’t short of, it’s very pleasant temple complexes.

The first leg of our journey saw us off bright and early to make our way south back to Phitsonaluk, where we had booked ourselves in for a night in an unremarkable, but cheap, guest-house near the river. A meal and a sleep later we were on our way again, this time catching a bus through the mountains to Khon Kaen. We could have done Chain Mai to Khon Kaen in one go, but it was a 13hr bus ride. See any of our South America blogs to see why that wasn’t going to happen.

Khon Kaen is Thailand’s 4^th largest city and lies about 3 hrs drive south of the Lao border. It’s railway connection to Bangkok and road connections to the centre and west of the country makes it something of a hub for the east of Thailand and for traffic heading north to Vientiane or east inn the direction of Vietnam. It also has a surprisingly large expat community as well as some tourist attractions in its own right, so we decided to stay for a few days and use up the rest of our Visas.

We booked ourselves in to the ‘Khon Kaen Residence’ a relatively new hotel a little way out from the centre right next to a large, scary looking prison. This proved something of an issue as, like something out of ‘The Great Escape’, the prison’s PA system would pipe-up about 7am every morning admonishing the inmates for…god knows what, being a disappointment to the King maybe? It seems that whoever was operating this PA system was very dedicated to their job of telling other people how naughty they are and how benevolent the state is as this went on all throughout the day until about 8pm (at time of writing were in Laos, so I feel we can push the envelope a little more)

The hotel also turned out to be in something of a tourist blackspot, a fact that wasn’t apparent to us at time of booking. There were no restaurants, shops, other hotels or even tuk-tuks waiting to bother us within a good mile or so in every direction, so we ended up having to call a grab taxi every time we wanted to go anywhere (yay more travelling). Having spent 2 days pretty much constantly on the move our motivation to do anything on the first day in Khon Kaen was very low. We instead made bookings for Vientiane and double checked that we had everything we needed for crossing the border into Laos. In aid of this, I went for a little excursion to a Bureau de Change to swap some of our Baht for USD. Laos tourist visas can be paid for either with 35USD, 1500THB or an unspecified amount of Lao Kip. At time of writing, 1500THB is closer to 50USD so even with the small commission for exchanging Baht, you still get a much better rate paying in dollars.

Remember earlier when I mentioned ‘acute frustration’? Well let’s just say we’ll be re-visiting the subjects of US Dollars and Lao Visas in the near future.

So anyway, the following day (our last full day in Thailand☹) we decided to make up for our rather lackadaisical day the day before and head out to see some sights. Our first stop was Wat Thung Setthi, a much more modern Buddhist Temple completed in 2012. This temple is rather unique amongst those in Thailand, both in terms of its design as well as its use of imagery and iconography to convey its message and meaning. Architecturally, the building is predominantly white, but with a rounded golden stupa highlighted with turquoise decorations. The central stupa is surrounded by two tiers of walkways, the lower of which is quite broad and features mosaics of the Hellenistic zodiac and small statuettes of buddhas, lions and dragons each carefully inlayed with thin rectangular shards of mirrored glass. In each of the 4 corners are smaller stupas separated from the walkway by a triangular pond with steppingstones leading across it. The upper walkway is overhung by the roof of the main stupa and features a large mosaic mounted on the wall explaining that this site is believed to be a gateway between this world, the heavens above and the underworld below.

Whilst Katy made friends with the local dgs, I went to chck out the central stupa, a tall octagonal building with a single, marble floored room inside. The large wooden door leading into the space is engraved with the symbols of the Chinese zodiac and opposite a large obsidian-black Buddha with gold accessories sits atop a marble altar. On the sets of 3 windows to either side of the Buddha are intricate etchings depicting the three poisons of the Buddhist belief system, those being; Greed, Aversion (Anger or Hatred) and Ignorance. The etchings make use of both traditional and modern iconography to illustrate these ideas, with the designs including characters from Star Wars, numerous Disney franchises and even Walter White.

Accessible via a small staircase just outside the main stupa is a large room which sits directly underneath it. In here is a stone pillar surrounded by statues of dragons in the centre and a series of 4 massive murals along the outer walls. Unlike many of the other temples we have visited in Thailand, what is striking about this temple is that it has been built with the knowledge that it is going to attract numerous foreigners and non-Buddhists. As such the descriptions of the artwork and explanations of the iconography are all in Thai, English and Chinese and the iconography is much more explicit and accessible to somebody not already familiar with Buddhist teachings. To do this whilst not cheapening the beliefs or making the site seem like a tourist attraction first and a religious site second is impressive, and as we left we both agreed that this was probably the best of the temples we’d seen in Thailand.

We couldn’t leave Wat Thung Setthi just yet, though, first we had to go to hell! A short walk over the land-bridge from the temple and down past the Monks dorms is a small park set aside to depict Naraka, the Buddhist interpretation of hell. Here there are absurd and larger than life fibreglass and concrete statue of sinners who have accumulated too much bad karma in their lives being tortured in manners most befitting their indiscretions. There are seven sins in Buddhism (sound familiar) and there are seven groups of statues being tortured in various different ways depicting the fate that waits sinners in the afterlife; liars get their tongues pulled out, thieves get their hands smashed with clubs and sexual deviants get…well anyway you can look at the pictures for yourselves.

Following our education on what may or may not be awaiting Katy and I in the next life (no comment) we headed back in to Kohn Kaen and went for a walk around Kaen Nakhon, a large semi-artificial lake (semi as in it’s only there during the rainy season, during the dry season it routinely needs topping up) just south of the city centre which has a number of large model dinosaurs on its banks. As you do.

For our last night in Thailand we thought we’d push the boat out and go somewhere a bit special for dinner, as we had loved the food here so much and as it was the last chance we’d have to have Thai food until we returned in October , we went for Pizza. Over a surprisingly good pizza and a few beers we took stock of out time in Thailand. It’s really easy to see why so many tourists visit this country every year, it’s big without being too big, the people are friendly without being overly friendly, it’s cheap, it’s easy to get around (for the most part) and the culture is incredibly alive. In the west, there is a real tension between the past and the future, yet here Thailand seems much more at ease with the strains of the globalising world, incorporating modernity into the existing culture without losing its sense of uniqueness. No doubt if you lived here for any length of time you’d begin to see the issues and divisions in the society and the things that don’t work would become more apparent and grate on you more, but for the month we have been here Thailand has been wonderful and we’ve wound up both loving the country more than we expected to.

Onwards to Laos then.

So, despite our previous experiences with the trains we wound up using them one last time to get to Nong Khai, the Thai town which sits on the border. Getting to Nong Khai from Khon Kaen by bus proved surprisingly complicated and as the railway station in Nong Khai is right by the border control point it was the most logical choice. Fortunately this worked out fine as the train was running a mere 15 minutes late and the journey up to Nong Khai was only about two and a half hours, over an hour quicker than the bus would have been.

Khon Kaen station was recently upgraded and has only been open a few weeks now. The new station is absolutely gigantic, seemingly way bigger than the city warrants and build over two levels with the freigh line on the ground level and the passanger platforms 20 meters up in the air. Later research would reveal that Khon Kaen sits on the planned route for the Chinese led Trans-South-East Asian Railway network which plans to connect China with Singapore via Bangkok, Vientiane and Hanoi (yes that’s right, I’m the sort of sad person that would notice when a train station is too large for the town it serves and look it up several hours later). Chinese money in Southeast Asia is very noticeable, as it was in South America, and the bulk of it is going into property and infrastructure. Changing winds…

Once we got to Nong Khai it was only a short walk up to the border check point for the Thai-Lao friendship bridge, which would take us across the Mekong River in to Laos. After getting our exit stamp we waited (technically in no country) for the bus to take us across the bridge. You can walk it but it’s almost 2km to the other side and it was now about 12:30, otherwise known as sweaty o’clock. On the other side the road bears round to the left where a pair of criss-crossing chicanes swaps the traffic (with the help of lights I might add) on to the right (wrong) side of the road. Shortly past this point is Lao immigration where we jumped off the bus and were immediately surrounded by taxi and tuk-tuk drivers offering us rides to Vientiane. We hadn’t even got our visas yet but that didn’t seem to matter to them. Part of me wanted to take them up and see if they would actually wait around only for us to get refused entry, but I didn’t want to tempt fate.

We went up to the window for Visa papers and were each handed (or rather, were slung) a pile of forms to fill in. By now sweaty o’clock was in full swing and in the blazing heat we both attempted to concentrate on filling in vague, confusing forms without dripping on them, hoping that we had correctly interpreted the questions it was asking us about residence (In Laos? In Thailand? In England? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM US?!?). Forms filled in we went back to the window and handed them over along with our passports, our passport photos that we had diligently brought with and the 70USD. Within seconds the friendly, helpful and smiling immigration officer was throwing the dollars back at us for being too old or beaten up or for having the tiniest of imperfections. Of the around 130USD we had on only about 10 met his exacting standard so we ended up absolutely stuck. I tried to ask how else we could pay, but he decided he’d had enough of us he told us to go to the next window over and shut his in our faces, our passports and the sole, acceptable 10USD note still in his possession

The officer in the next window was a tad more helpful and said we could combine dollars and Baht if we wanted to, but after my lengthy escapade to an exchange in Kohn Kaen for the SOLE REASON of getting dollars to pay for the visa, we now no longer had enough Baht left. The officer then told us to get the money changed for ‘better’ dollars at the exchange around the corner, however they also wouldn’t accept notes that weren’t hermetically sealed and plated in gold. By this point I was getting very worked up but Katy helpfully pointed out that this was all going to make an excellent blog post, so it wasn’t all bad. Eventually we had to make use of the over-priced ATM “recommended” to us by the customs officer who most definitely was not getting any kick-backs from the ATM provider to withdrawer some Kip to make the payment.

About half an hour after starting the process and (once I’d worked it all out later taking into account withdrawal commissions and exchange rate differences) paying about £15 more than we had anticipated, we finally got our visas. We agreed a price for a taxi from a nice man who had been hanging around whilst we trying to get everything sorted, helpfully smiling and pointing us in the direction of the different windows, the exchange booth and the ATM machine. As we set off the heavens opened and so our first experience of Lao was trying to make out the road in front of us in monsoon conditions.

We made it to Vientiane about 20 minutes later and got dropped off around the corner from our hotel, arriving to find that the heavy rain had taken out the power and preventing them from taking card payments, instead we had to use the rest of our recently withdrawn Lao Kip. Katy withdrew 2,000,000K and we’d spent it all in the space of about 30 minutes. I don’t think we’ve ever spent two million of anything on anything before, so that’s something. For the record, 2 million Kip is about £180, but it’s not quite as impressive when you put it like that.

Thoroughly exhausted we crashed out on the bed and after about 20 minutes or so the power came back on so we could finally get some precious, precious internet. It also came to our attention that the toilet fills constantly, and the drainpipe was disconnected from the sink meaning that the bathroom floor floods every time you run the tap. After a quick plumbing adventure wherein I fixed the sink but made the toilet worse and I pretended I hadn’t touched it, we headed out for a well-deserved beer for the princely sum of 90p. No power, questionable plumbing & cheap beer. Yep, this is the southeast Asia I was expecting.

Boobies. Lol

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.

Jura-sick Sucre

Still feeling the after effects of being vibrated down a mountain a few days before, we had a day to kill before our El Dorado night bus to Bolivia’s ‘official’ capital, Sucre. Rather than sit in a coffee shop and eat cake all day, we booked ourselves onto another Red Cap walking tour, this time of La Paz’s massive cemetery and a trip on the cable car up to El Alto – La Paz’s poorer sister city – to the huge Sunday market.

La Paz’s Cementerio General is a bit different to the graveyards we have back home. Death is seen much more as ‘the next step’ in life rather than the end of the road that it is in Western culture, so cemeteries are a combination of mourning and celebration, giving them a really unique atmosphere. We stopped just past the entrance amongst the towering graves for an explanation of a slightly more gruesome aspect of the strange amalgamation of Catholicism and local shamanic religious culture – the Ñatitas. A Ñatita (meaning – snub nose) is the skull of a deceased person which is kept in an altar in the home and serves as a guardian against bad things happening to you. Daily offerings are made to your Ñatita to keep them happy and to make sure good luck keeps coming your way. Offerings include booze, money, cigarettes, sweets, chocolate….all the good stuff basically. Then, on the 8^th November every year, people from La Paz bring their Ñatitas to the cemetery so that others can come and be blessed. The Ñatitas are dressed in hats and clothes, even sunglasses, and placed on altars around the cemetery before being surrounded by flowers and offerings, with people hoping that the Ñatita will make their wish come true or bless their family. Often the skulls are passed down from generation to generation and once a Ñatita is yours, it’s yours for life. If you don’t get along with it, or if it doesn’t get along with you, you are allowed to give it away but selling it is strictly forbidden. Oddly enough if you do want to acquire a Ñatita, paying a larger sum to your local coroner will secure you a Ñatita of higher social standing, a doctor or lawyer Ñatita for example. As you can imagine, the Catholic church doesn’t really approve of not burying these skulls but they tend to turn a blind eye in order to maintain a healthy relationship with the local indigenous communities.

The cemetery itself houses thousands of graves. Families purchase their own slot in the wall, with the higher slots being cheaper due to the need to climb a ladder to pay your respects. In general families will pay to keep the slot for around 2 years before allowing the payments to lapse, you get 2 months’ grace period before your family member is removed and cremated. It’s interesting to see the differences in the wealth of the families buying the graves, with fancy marble and glass fronted plots next to those filled in with cement and words crudely drawn into it; serving as a morbid reminder that no matter who we are in life, we all kick the bucket in the end my friend! Walking around the place you can sometimes see small pieces of paper attached to the graves, our guide informed us that these were eviction notices – some things never change. On a slightly more cheery note, the cemetery is also home to some cracking murals. We were told that there is an art contest every year and the winners are permitted to paint a mural in the cemetery. They’ve even started some on the roofs of the graves as well so that when you take the cable car over it, it looks a lot less grey. The contest recently opened up to foreigners so if you’ve always dreamed of having your art on show, surrounded by a whole bunch of skeletons then you know where to go!

Having had our fill of the macabre, our next stop was the El Alto market. Our guide warned us that pickpocketing is rife at this market, particularly of gringos. Some of their favourite tricks are to drop something, then when you stop to help them they steal your stuff, or someone will throw a fake baby at you and when you catch it, they take the opportunity to help themselves to anything in your pockets. For the most part, both Peru and Bolivia have been very safe, seemingly due to the fact that tourism now makes up such a large portion of their economy and if they get a reputation for being a bit dodgy then the lovely western currency won’t make its way to that part of the city. Rucksacks secured to our fronts and pockets emptied of anything other than snotty tissues, we took the red cable car up to El Alto. The market itself on a Sunday stretches to around 5 kilometres, making it allegedly the largest in the whole of South America. Selling everything from socks to car parts to cameras stolen from tourists down in La Paz and unfortunately some endangered animals as well. Luckily we didn’t delve too far in so we didn’t see any of the more upsetting things BUT, in a Katy first, I was the victim of a pickpocketing attempt! A chap dropped his hat in front of me and bent down to pick it up, preventing me from going forward, then before I knew it, a large woman in black was fiddling around in my pockets. I hope she enjoyed my snotty tissues. I quickly barged forward to re-join the rest of our tour group and excitedly explained to Dave that I had just been pickpocketed! Not that she managed to get anything. We were largely left alone to explore the market after that but it was definitely an experience. Opportunistic crime like that can largely be forgiven in my opinion, if you’re stupid enough to walk around with expensive gear within easy reach in one of the poorest countries in the world then really, it’s to be expected. Besides, give it a few days and you can pop back to the market to buy your stuff back. Apparently you can get some really good deals on technology stolen from gringos but we didn’t stick around long enough to find out. With the tour largely over, we parted ways with our guide and our group and headed back down to the relative safety of La Paz where we stopped at a little Mexican place for dinner before heading to the bus station to catch the long anticipated night bus.

We’d heard many a horror story regarding Bolivia’s buses but for the most part, our experience overall has been a positive one. The night coaches for El Dorado are double decker and can probably fit around 30 people. We were elated to see that our bus was FULL CAMA. This means that the seat reclines all the way back to 180 degrees with a little foot rest that folds up, giving you about as close to an actual bed as you can get. We’d heard rumours of these mystical full cama buses but were firmly told that they didn’t actually exist and the companies that advertised them were just a way to get a bit more money out of the gringos. We had paid around £20 each for the privilege and let me tell you dear reader it was worth every penny. The only slight downside was just how hot the bus was. We’d been told Bolivian coach drivers like to crank up the AC so had prepared for a chilly night but it was SO warm that by the end of the 12 hour journey we were both feeling very groggy. BUT we had arrived in the beautiful capital of Sucre which could only mean one thing – DINOSAURS.

One of the unfortunate downsides of taking night buses is that you end up at your destination incredibly early in the morning and hotels often won’t allow you to check in until after midday. We’ve been incredibly lucky so far (in no small part I imagine due to it being the off season) that the hotels we’ve arrived at have all had our rooms ready when we arrived. El Olivo Viejo was no exception and even had the added bonus of a beautiful pussy cat and a big softy Labrador to welcome us. We were even more pleasantly surprised to find that we had been upgraded to the rooftop suite which included a kitchen and a cracking view over the brilliant white city buildings, as well as the surrounding mountains. After a shower and a nap, we decided to head out to a local ‘gastro-pub’ style restaurant for dinner before researching a walking tour of the city for the following day (as is tradition).

The following morning, bellies full of the hotel’s great breakfast and having bid hasta luego to our feline friend, we headed to Condor Café, a local non-profit co-op offering walking tours, Spanish lessons and a range of veggie dishes. We arrived just after 9am, ready for our 9:30 walking tour. Except there was no 9:30 walking tour. Unbeknownst to us, it had, since the last Trip Advisor review was listed, moved to 10am. Ho hum. We sat outside the café under the blue Sucre sky and Dave took the opportunity to go on a little trip to try and find some replacement sunglasses for the ones he snapped during his little brush with death down Death Road. Much to the frustration of both Dave and his eyes, we seemed to have found the only street in Sucre that didn’t have a little knock off sunglasses stand. He bravely soldiered on as the clock ticked to 10am and our walking tour finally began. A group of around 10 of us were led through the city by Alistair, whose English wasn’t fantastic but we muddled through. He first took us to a local weaving shop (oh goody another one…) featuring products made by the local indigenous communities around La Paz. Unlike Peru, the communities of Bolivia’s Altiplano use far more muted colours, owing I would imagine to the lack of diversity in its flora and therefore a lack of colours to be obtained from various plants in the region. Still, they were very interesting and had we had the room in our suitcases, probably would have brought a few bits home. Our next stop on the tour was the main square – Plaza 25 de Mayo – so named for the Chuquisaca (modern day Sucre) Revolution of 1809 which followed the fall of King Ferdinand VII of Spain, leading local residents to question the legitimacy of its rulers and to posit their independence. It’s often referred to as the first step in the Spanish American wars of independence, so that’s pretty cool! At the time of our stay in Sucre, Bolivia was commemorating (or perhaps commiserating?) its loss of the Pacific Ocean following the Pacific War with Chile in 1883. ‘El Die del Mar’ or The Day of the Sea is marked every year on the 23^rd March with parades through the streets with local military operations as well as local schools and marching bands. It’s an interesting story which others online are able to explain much better than myself but one interesting point is that in 2013, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales filed a complaint with the International Court of Justice in the Hague, petitioning them for the return of the ocean. Sadly, or perhaps not, depending on your views on the whole matter, the petition was rejected. The Bolivians are a resilient people though and they are now planning a new legal challenge. Hopefully one day they will once again regain their access to the sea. Unfortunately with all this going on it meant we couldn’t hear a word Alistair was saying so we quickly moved on to a local chocolate shop – Para Ti.

Para-Ti is a Sucre run chocolate factory with several shops around the city. The cacao is sourced in the Bolivian jungle and processed to exceptionally high standards before being finished off by European trained chocolatiers – so it’s not bad I guess. We were allowed to sample one chocolate each as part of our tour, I went for coconut, Dave went for pistachio – yum. Vowing to come back at a later date, we moved on towards Parque Bolivar, so named for Simon Bolivar, largely credited with liberating vast swathes of South America. It’s a really pretty park with French influences, including a mini Eiffel tower in the centre, though this one is bright orange and doesn’t really do the original any justice. Each to their own I suppose. Following our jaunt around this pretty park, we were herded onto a bus where we headed up to one of the higher parts of the city where a lovely view, and some booze, awaited us. With our tour guide safely leading the way, we wandered into what at first glance just looked like someone’s back yard but it soon became apparent we were at one of Bolivia’s famous “Chicharias” where we got to sample some very strong Chicha. We took our seats in the corner but not before the local drunks welcomed us to Bolivia and tried and failed to chat up some of the women in our group. Chicha is a fermented corn drink that tastes, oddly enough, like scrumpy. It’s quite potent but we enjoyed our small glass before heading outside to play what we were told was a traditional Bolivian drinking game. The premise of the game is fairly simple. A metal frog around the size of a grapefruit sits atop a metal frame with a shelf on top containing various holes. You’re given a cup full of coins and the aim of the game is to throw the coins at the frog and the holes, with each awarding various points. If you manage to get a coin in the frog’s mouth then you win, otherwise the person with the most amount of points is the winner. I wasn’t very good. Dave was ok. The winner was a tiny blonde woman from the USA who I suspect has a long history of playing beer pong so we weren’t too disheartened. Our tour finished up at a fabulous view over the city, next to a lovely restaurant called Café Mirador which was beckoning us to stop and have a beer, so we did. After enjoying our meal and with the weather similar to a hot Mediterranean summer we decided to head back to the hotel, but not before a chap approached us and, for the 99999999999^th time this trip, asked us if we’d like to buy some weed, or some cocaine. He was very polite, apologising for disturbing us in the first place and spoke perfect English but unfortunately neither of these two criteria were sufficient for us to risk a stay in San Pedro prison, so we declined. Heading back to the apartment, we stopped briefly to buy some totally legitimate Rui Foo (I think they’re supposed to be Ray Bans?!) sunglasses for Dave, as well the necessary supplies to make ourselves nachos for dinner. The rest of our evening was spent drinking beer and catching up on Star Trek because that’s what you do when you travel half way around the world, right?

Sunday morning arrived and the beautiful weather continued. Sucre is a particularly radiant city in the sunshine, with the light bouncing off the pearlescent white colonial style buildings, highlighted against the clear blue sky. We headed down to the main square where a bus was waiting to take us to Tarabuco, a market town around 1h15m drive away from Sucre. Tarabuco is home to a large Sunday market where you can buy everything from the normal tourist rubbish to DVDs of Cholitas dancing, to shoes, to cows, and everything in between. We were greeted at what we were told is the only restaurant in town (read, the only gringo friendly restaurant in town) by a radiant woman named Katy (!) who was absolutely delighted to find out that we shared a name. She expressed her love of the English language before explaining everything we could have ever possibly wanted to know about Tarabuco and the market and how to say “no thanks, maybe later” in Quechua (which we have now forgotten). After wandering round the market and picking up a few souvenirs for some lucky people back home, we headed back to the restaurant where Katy greeted us once again and we sat down to enjoy a 3 course lunch for 40 Bobs (around £4.40). The meal was peppered with Katy apologising for the delay every time she brought out a dish, despite the fact that there was no delay. This woman was as mad as a box of frogs but quite possibly the nicest person in the whole of Bolivia, if not the entirety of South America. The restaurant was family run but she explained that she was an engineer, heavens knows what she was doing in this tiny little mountain town. After lunch we were treated to a display of local dances by some young girls from the town. They looked about as enthused as teenagers do when they have to do anything mildly inconvenient, but we gave them a few Bobs for the trouble. We bid farewell to our eccentric host and headed back to Sucre with our bellies full and our minds open and in the evening enjoyed some pasta and a few rounds of gin (that’s the card game not the drink) before bed. And that’s when the fun began…

The following 3 days I had the absolute pleasure of being entirely bed bound due to a delightful bought of travellers’ stomach. Fear not dear reader, I do not wish to relive the experience anymore than you want to read about it so I shall simply say that we did not get to see nearly as much of Sucre as we would have liked but that Nurse Dave was on top form as always. I’m sure I’ll get the chance to return the favour when we head to Asia.

It was now Thursday and, despite not feeling 100%, I was determined to go and see these flipping dinosaurs if it killed me. Cretaceous Park is situated next to a working quarry around 5km outside Sucre’s town centre. It is home to some delightfully derpy life size models of the dinosaurs that inhabited the region many many moons ago as well as its star attraction, the world’s largest fossilised remains of dinosaur footprints. Over 5000 individual footprints from at least 8 species can be seen in the 1500m long cliff. It’s really something that needs to be seen to be believed. At 110m high it stands imposing over the rest of the park. With our entrance ticket we also had the opportunity to get up close and personal with these footprints. Sadly a few years ago a large section was lost due to water damage and the park is now seeking funding to cover the entire section with a protective layer of plastic. They’re nearly there so hopefully they can prevent any more of these amazing footprints from being lost. Being a huge dinosaur nerd, a gift to the gift shop was inevitable and I was heartbroken to find that the only t-shirts on offer were child sized (I can’t think why!). So after acquiring a new deck of playing cards, we headed back to Sucre where we finally ventured to the local Para-Ti chocolate shop and acquired some goodies for when my stomach settled down a bit. We then headed back to the hotel for our final night of luxury before our journey to Uyuni and slumming it in the salt flats for 3 days, but that’s another story for another time….