Isla Ballestas, Perú

The 24 hours after leaving Lima were kinda nuts. My friend Brett travels at a pace unlike anything I’ve seen before. We met for the first time back in Quito, and would run into each other several times over the next couple months as we migrated south towards Patagonia - The Gringo Trail. We ran into each other for the second time at the bus station in the mountain village of Huaraz, heading to Lima on the same bus. With both our sights set on Arequipa in the far south of Peru, I figured I would try to match Brett’s frenetic pace. 

Our first day of traveling together was pretty wild, beginning in Lima and ending in Arequipa, with two stops on the way. These 24 hours can be measured by our many means of transport: a four hour night bus followed by a 2 hour boat ride, a second bus traveling further south to a town where we would catch a sand buggy ride and go sand boarding, and lastly, a twelve hour night bus ending in Arequipa, Peru. 

It all began with the decision to leave Lima at 3am on a very early bus that would take us south to Paracas. A small coastal city on the Pacific from which you could visit Isla Ballestas, popularly termed “ The Poor Mans Galapagos”. For $20 one can tour around a group of islands with seals and sea birds including the coveted blue booby.

Our hostel in Lima was rather pricy, so we decided that instead of paying for another night we would just hang around until 2am. It sounds sneaky, but the party at this hostel never stopped. No one would think anything of us hanging around the common areas until the wee morning hours.  

Partying isn’t really my thing, nor was it in my budget. Instead I had been enjoying a beautifully conservative sleeping schedule: in bed before 10pm and up around 7am. Staying up until our bus to Paracas seemed simple enough. We staked out a corner of the breakfast room and worked on our respective blogs, made some dinner and ate some chocolate. But by just 11pm we were tired. Worse still, the breakfast room began to transform into the bar and house music steadily gaining in volume mocked our exhaustion. Desperate to escape, we sought refuge in an unoccupied TV room adjacent to the breakfast room turned bar. With the never ending beat of house music just outside the door, it wasn’t peaceful, but it was comfortable. We chatted a little, caught up on our correspondence, watched some youtube videos and at some point, I fell asleep on the couch mid conversation. 

At 2am my alarm went off. We gathered our things and hopped into a taxi heading to the bus station. The wrong bus station. A very kind man working the ticket desk offered to drive us up the road to the right place where we managed to buy two tickets. The bus pulled up, we found seats and passed out for the next four hours. Exhausted, it was all a blur. 

With my face buried into my jacket, serving as a pillow between my head and the window, I could feel warm sunlight on my face and see an orange glow though my closed eyes. I tried to open an eye, but four hours of sleep made for painfully heavy eye lids. I managed to open an eye just a peep to peered through the orange, brown curtains of the bus. A flat grey desert stretched out around us with rolling dunes in the distance. It looked like a landscape out of Star Wars. Minutes later we turned off the main road into the kitsch, ocean side town of Paracas, Peru. 

It was 8:30am when we stumbled off the bus, grabbed our bags and stood by the side of the single road running through the town. The night before we had researched several places were we might be able to leave our backpacks bags while on the boat tour. One of them happened to be right across the street from where the bus had dropped us, so we went there. A very sweet woman lead us to the storage room, and allowed us to use the lobby bathroom to brush our teeth and splash a little water on our tired cheeks. 

We meet up with our tour group just outside this same hotel and shortly there after followed the guide towards our boat. Along with maybe fifteen other groups we loaded into motorboats and headed out into the Pacific. We stopped along the way to view a (WHAT IS IT CALLED?). It was a pleasant surprise to see this one since Brett and I were skipping out on the $100 flight in Nazca to fly over the bulk of these creations, collectively we were more interested in spending our money on any mountains we came across. 

Within a half hour we reached the main event: a small group of rocky islands decorated with pelicans, blue footed boobies, a funny group of Humboldt penguins, and sunbathing sea lions. 

You know the scenes in Planet Earth where thousands of birds fly together in mighty clouds, in coordinated dances that create these wave patterns? Well the coolest part of this whole tour was watching a sea bird colony that occupies one of the islands. From way out in the Pacific came a never ending stream of birds flying towards their island home. Thousands of them created these flowing black lines moving in waves that mirrored the ocean below. A movement similar to the Northern Lights ebb and flow. Traveling as if they were one being or something fluid, they journeyed from the open Pacific to nest on this island. 

Equally as fascinating were the ruins of a unique mining industry on the island. In the 1980s people lived and worked on these islands, collecting guano (sea bird droppings) to use as fertilizer. According to our guide it was lucrative until modern fertilizers came into the picture destroying the enterprise. 

All in all I enjoyed our little boat tour. I had skipped out on the beach towns in Ecuador and Peru to stay in the Andes, so it was nice to say hello to the Pacific. We spent a grand total of three hours in Paracas, and I’m not totally sure what you might do there if you spent an entire day. By noon we were passed out on our second bus heading two hours south to Huacachina. 

Stay Tuned,

lil