Lima to Paracas, Peru

Paracas Hotel. San Augustin

Happy Hallowe’en! Awake at 6:00, up and showered and down for breakfast. We were met at 9:30 by our driver Javier (Havier) in a van, for our trip to Paracas. The countryside is desert and very brown. Large hills of sand, many shacks and “hovels”. After about 100 or more km. we started to see the ocean and things did get a bit greener, palm trees and some scrubby grasses. Started to see some oil refineries and signs of some agriculture. Corn, some kind of low growing vegetable, maybe squash and palm trees. We went through the large city of Pisco and then arrived in Paracas at the Hotel San Augustin Paracas. We were met there by our guide Olenka who advised that we were too early to check in, so our bags were stored, and we went to a small restaurant La Muna, right by the ocean for lunch. Lee had a shrimp omelet which was served over rice, and Don had fish ceviche.

We then departed for the Paracas Reserve. This reserve was a complete surprise to us as it was an immense desert. 335,000 hectares 60% of which was on the ocean. The whole desert was under the ocean millions of years ago. The Tectonic plate called Nazca or Oceanic Plate moved under the South America plate and heaved up the land out of the ocean. It is still actively moving so the land area is increasing. The roads are built out of salt which attracts moisture and it packs down hard and they look like ashphalt as the black from the tires rubs off. When the road becomes a bit rough, they just pack down more salt. There is a salt mine in the reserve and large dump trucks cross this reserve daily with their loads of salt. When the salt dries quickly it looks white when it dries more slowly it looks clear like a crystal. We saw lots of fossils of shellfish from the bottom of the ocean. The sand is very course and is made up of basalt (black) and iron (red) and Gypsum (white), over layers of clay.

We were taken to several areas and in each area Olenka showed us something different. One of the areas we went to was a lookout where we saw a rock formation that used to be joined as a bridge with a hollowed out area in the middle. In 2007 there was a very bad earthquake in Peru registering 7.9 on the Richter scale. There were reports of lightning coming out of the ground. The bridge of the rock formation fell into the ocean and is no longer visible. The last area we saw was a red sand beach from the fragments of rock dragged by waves to the Santa Maria Headland. The rock is igneous rock called Pink Granodiorite, it contains magma hardened core from volcanos. The rock is of course, not renewable so it is protected and cannot be extracted from the area. Already some of the headland is being washed away by the waves and is falling into the ocean.

After this tour we returned to the hotel and Don, Judy and Michael enjoyed dinner at the hotel while Lee slept. When Don returned, he suggested we go back down together so I could try some soup. That was a good idea but then straight back to bed.Read more