It’s become one of my favourite travel countries.

How is that the Pacific Northwest?

Northern B.C.?

Yes, I’ve determined to try not to complain if it rains too much. Not enough rain is far worse.

Yeah. It was great fun.

I wondered about that. Standing on the top of one of the dunes, I was thinking it looked like Arrakis.

I can’t find anywhere that says. My feeling is it’s sand all the down to the bedrock because there are some very deep valleys. We drove all over them in a dune buggy and there was no bedrock showing anywhere, just sand.

The thought is they were for astronomical or religous reasons.

Yes. Huacachina is actually just on the edge of the dune desert.

Yeah. It was pretty cool. The sand surfing was a lot like tobaganning.

You really won’t see it from the bus window. You’ll just know it’s there from the tower. We took collectivos mostly and the occasional bus. Collectivos were a whole lot easier than buses. The last part of the trip, we hooked up with Peruhop.

Yeah, it’s sad, actually.

There’s a tower along the highway that you can go up (for a few soles) and see a few of the figures. If you want a really good look, you can get a plane ride, but that’s expensive.

The common thought is that this is a cactus. All these lines are in a desert, but not a sand desert. It’s just rocks and gravel. Therefore, they don’t get filled in with sand. Also, they only get a cm or two of rain a year and often that comes as mist, so very little erosion. The lines were made by scraping of the top 10 to 15 cm of pebbly rock to expose a slightly different colour of rock underneath. This particular figure is not in the Nazca region (therefore not made by the Nazca people). It was in the Paracas national park. You can’t actually get to it by land. It’s on a hill slope on the coast. I took a picture of it while passing by on a tour to the Ballestas Islands. The actual Nazca lines can be seen from a tower along the highway, but it isn’t high enough to get a really good picture. You can take a plane ride, but I’m not that rich.

Yeah, I did know that, but I didn’t get a really good picture of the Nazca lines. We went up the tower, but they didn’t show up very well.

Seriously? Why?

Yeah. I climbed one of the dunes beside the oasis and could see it. Basically sitting in the the middle of the town of Ica.

It didn’t seem like much of a problem at the hostel. There weren’t really strong winds which for sure helps.

Good question. Those sand dunes are higher than they look. Some are 500 meters high.

Yeah, I wouldn’t drink from it though. It looked pretty scuzzy.