Paracas National Reserve

Before heading to (and staying in) Peru‘s higher altitudes we decided to do a rather spontaneous short trip to the pacific coast south of Lima to visit Paracas. Paracas tempted us because of two things we‘ve missed or will miss: tiny islands full of birds, penguins and sea lions (also called ‚poor man‘s galapagos‘) and a nature reserve with the prehistoric geoglyph known as ‚candelabra‘, which gives a taste of the famous nazca lines in Peru.
Already on the way to Paracas we were surprised by the very barren, sandy landscape along the coast, which stayed up until Paracas. Paracas itself is small but very much based on tourists and we both agreed that we have not seen so many tourists in one place for a long time! Still, the town was super quiet and right at the beach, and - in Alinas opinion - an excellent mixture between comfortable-touristy and super-shabby. Depending on where about in town you walked by, you‘d feel like you‘re somewhere in the middle east?!
We were anyways so excited by these very unexpected and very unknown scenery that we decided to stay one more night and add a tour to the Paracas National Reserve to the already planned morning boat trip to the Islas Ballestas 🥰
The boat tour to Islas Ballestas - or ‚poor many gallapagos‘ - did not disappoint us: We saw dolphins along both ways, sea lions, many peruvian pelicanes and other birds we don‘t know the names, and were even lucky enough to spot two of the tiny Humbodt penguins waddling around! And besides the animals, also the islands themselves were beauties with the many-coloured stones in turquoise waters 😍 Another place where 20 pictures are not enough to show everything!!
In the afternoon, we decided to get sporty and booked two bikes to drive the around 13km to the National Reserve and back - not a big issue with bikes, you would think, but you think wrong 🙃 Have we mentioned the strong winds yet? No? How about the shitty sand/gravelroads and the two jokes of bikes we got? Well, you get the idea why it was definitely not easy, and not so very enjoyable as we hoped 😂 Still, there were not many people around the whole way (certainly not on bikes, hehe) and the vastness and emptyness of the sandflats were impressive and again something we had not encountered before. Plus, a good workout every now and then harms nobody ;) So even though a (quite literal) pain in the behinds, we would do it all over again anytime! Enjoy the views 🥰Read more