Altos Urrutia

Another beautiful sunny day. We are docked across a bay from Paracas. This is the stop for excursions to the Nazca lines, Ises des Balladaras or the desert for dune buggy rides. Once again, we are docked in a commercial, industrial port, albeit much smaller than most of the others. Flatbed trucks are lined up waiting to get into the dockyards for their loads of iron bars.

Wendy elects go for a boat tour of Iles des Balladaras which she later tells us was an excellent excursion. We are glad as we had done this the last time we were in this area and so had pushed the group to consider this excursion.

The rest of the group take the shuttle into town and then engage a taxi driver to take them into the Paracas National Reserve outside Paracas.. This is a large protected area of the Peruvian desert. They found the landscape fascinating and saw some wild life.

Brian and I decide to take the shuttle into the village of Paracas and walk the boardwalk. As soon as we got there, we remembered coming there on our previous visit to Peru. I had bought some earrings from a vendor (which I still have and wear a lot in the summer) and we had lunch at one of the open air restaurants. This time, we just walked the boardwalk which was surprisingly busy for an early Friday afternoon. We later found out that this was the first day of winter holidays for the kids; the beach was full of families playing in the sand, with some swimming.

One of the attractions was a man and his trained pelican (who knew you could train a pelican). The pelican patiently stood and waited for a tourist to pose with him (her?) for a picture. The man would count to three and throw a piece of fish to the pelican, so the shot was of the tourist next to a pelican reaching for the fish. The woman we watched got a face full of pelican feathers when the bird spread it's wings succenly (for balance?) and wapped her in the face! Ugh, no thanks!

Tonight is our last night on the ship so we need to pack before bed. Suitcases outside our cabin doors by 10:00 p.m.Read more