A lazy morning at Casa Ana, followed by a taxi ride to the Cruz Del Sur bus station on the outskirts of town – goodbye to the big city for the time being. After a shaky start, where our bus driver ran into one of the traffic guiding police boxes which sit ubiquitously on the corner of every major intersection of Lima, we were on the road in some considerable comfort (which felt a bit like cheating).
En route Laura discovered how useful watching English language films with Spanish subtitles was to her learning, as Pierce Brosnan did his best David Attenborough impersonation on Oceans, while the actual ocean appeared on cue to our right. We drifted along through a bizarre landscape of desert mountains right next to the sea stretching away infinitely, while we were bombarded with colourful billboards advertising water, ice-cream and fashion on the Pan-American highway.
Dropped at the tourist town of Paracas, a starting point for trips to the outlying islands, we squeezed into a shared taxi with some locals and headed along the pungent-smelling coastal road through vast fish-processing plants, arriving after a while in Pisco. Trawling the town we discovered a half-built hotel with gaping holes in the walls and half-finished wiring, the latter of which I discovered by touching a live wire trying to plug in a lamp – only a minor shock luckily.
Health and safety in action - this was a two storey drop
In the evening we wandered aimlessly through the throng in the plaza major, talking to friendly street-vendors and working out what to do next. While not the loveliest town, it has lots of life as well as a thronging market and popular public spaces. Like the rest of the country, it seemed to be gripped by the presidential elections, of which there were an unending stream of different candidates, all of whom had their adherents painting huge slogans on fences, building sites etc.
On the campaign trail in Pisco...
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