Space Doodles

In every book on visiting South America, you get a lit of must- sees, and one of these is the Nazca lines. We had discussed our views on this before we left England and had concluded that we weren’t really that interested in spending two weeks budget to get in a tinny little plane to look at glorified crop circles from the air and then, as a bonus, to see what they looked like at high speed as the plane plummeted into the desert. Besides, we’d already seen the Nazca lines. It is impossible not to see them on every poster, fridge magnet, bus ticket and T-shirt from Lima to... Mars, probably. This quickly set us apart from every other gringo in town, who hung about in little groups wearing those awful striped trousers favoured by foreigners in Peru, lamenting that due to the recent tightening up in safety protocols it was now twice as expensive to get on a plane. They invited me to share their dismay but I couldn’t really see how not being in a plane crash was a negative point. Anyway, we found a mirador from which you can see two of the doodles, the hands and a tree, and a bit of a lizard. They were fine, as lines in the sand go, but I was happy enough with the postcard and the souvenir rock I had bought. Besides, our insurance policy doesn’t cover attempted suicide at inflated prices. We stayed for a couple of days until a bearded weirdo starting talking to me about giant spacecraft mining the rings of Saturn and offering to show me pictures. This is generally my cue to get out of anywhere.

Next stop Arequipa. This styles itself as Peru’s most sophisticated city. It is Peru’s second largest, although this is comfortably under a million people. It is also the self proclaimed White City, on account of having built with white volcanic rocks from the nearby El Misti volcano. My inner geek spent two days muttering ‘I will not let the White City fall’ in the voice of Aragorn. Ironic really, as its been flattened by earthquakes pretty regularly, including a big one in 2002. I learnt this on the roof of the cathedral, where I also attempted to quietly clang the city bell, but the tour guide obviously thought I looked the type and wouldn’t turn away for long enough. He was, however, quite impressed with my identification of the pelican motif on the church mostrance, which goes to show my history A level wasn’t a complete waste of time.

As hard as I looked, I couldn’t really sense the aforementioned sophistication. Our hostel probably didn’t help. The guidebook promised us a relaxing roof terrace with hammocks but had clearly changed hands since the book was published. The result is a cross between a 1970s hospital ward and the inside of a biscuit tin, with odd chunks missing from the walls and tisues blowing down empty corridors. The dueña looked frankly shocked to see us, but the room had cable TV so we stayed.

Arequipa is the jump off point for tours into the Colca canyon, the world’s second deepest (the deepest one, Cotohausi is next door, and 163 metres deeper). We decided to skip the package tour and make our own way there. We’re getting quite good at this now and the journey to Cabanaconde passed without incident although it was too dark to see anything of the view. Chris spent the best part of the journey with a little old man sitting on his lap as the bus was very crowded but I decided to wink at such infidelity. Next stop: Into the canyon.