So, a little apology my friends. Blogging while traveling is difficult business, so just as in India, we are way behind on blog posts. However, I will continue to post them and hope you'll still enjoy reading them knowing that we are safely back in The States. Oh yea, we're back in The States. We're in Las Cruces right now visiting friends and family. This weekend we'll be heading to a cabin in NM for a little retreat before we go back to reality and head to Columbus. I intend to get this blog caught up to present time, and keep it updated as we continue our adventures. Thank you for your patience! With that said, here's the latest blog post - Enjoy!
Our next stop after Pisco – ICA! Which we pretty much waived hello to and then headed straight for Huacachina, a tourist haven nestled between sand dunes about 40 miles across and 300 feet high (that’s our guess, which could be wildly inaccurate, but just visualize sands dunes as far as the eye can see!). This city’s biggest tourist thing is four-wheeling through the dunes and sandboarding down the slopes. Amy about peed her pants just thinking of it (she’s not the most adventurous gal), but she got over herself and one fine evening we decided to check it out. Our description wouldn’t possibly capture this experience. It was SO fun and quite the adrenaline rush. Some of the drivers are crazy!! Ours, thankfully, was just the right amount of crazy to make the experience fun, but not scary. And the sand-boarding was pretty awesome, which is saying a lot since Amy strongly dislikes anything related to snowboards (bad experience at Killington, Vermont one year), but the dunes where so high that most amateurs couldn’t actually go down standing up. We all went down on our bellies. FUN!! Unfortunately, we don’t have any pictures of this, since we didn’t want to ruin our camera with sand.
At this point in our Peruvian adventure, we started to discover a little pattern with flying objects and Amy’s right eyeball. Apparently, her eyelashes appear to be a runway for flies, gnats, and other flying things to park on. At least once a day, she had some little guy fly directly at her eye. A couple of times, she closed her eye quickly and caught them in her eyelashes. This is not fun, folks! Of course Rob started laughing everytime this would happen, because it’s like all these flies went and told their friends about Amy. As you can expect, she started wearing sunglasses a lot more.
The day after sandboarding, we did a little wine tour to some nearby wineries. Southern Peru is known for its fine grape-growing climate and making the countries best wines and Pisco (a brandy liquor). Our verdict: Peru, drop the wine, stick to the Pisco!
Our last day in this area, we headed into town (Ica) to visit a museum that our Lonely Planet raved about. We like museums; we’re totally those people. This museum was pretty quaint, but totally blew our minds. The museum was robbed back in 2004 where some of the most ancient weavings were stolen. We learned that, sadly, ancient art robbery is quite a booming profession. Despite this, their collection is still pretty impressive. It is mostly of the Paracas and Nazca civilizations, which is pre-Incan, we’re talking 500 B.C.E.! The most striking thing was the last room of the museum which houses several full mummies, skulls, and even a mummified macaw (complete with feathers!). The bodies were preserved so well, that some of them still had skin and hair. The skulls were also mind-blowing. Did you know that these ancient people were obsessed with perfecting their appearance just like we are today? We like to shave ourselves, dye our hair, have plastic surgery, etc.; they liked to shape people's heads. They thought that head shape was the most beautiful and distinguished thing. The upper classes of this society practiced head deformation, where they wrapped the head and used contraptions to shape the head from the time of birth. The most common shape was elongated (think coneheads, but flat on top). We were truly speechless. We’ve never seen anything quite like it. We felt like we literally had stepped back in time with all these bodies. We weren’t able to take pictures, but we’ve posted a picture from the web to give you the idea of what we saw.
So, at this point, we were really beginning to get a glimpse of ancient Peru. Now for some REAL mysteries…the Nazca Lines!
Our next stop after Pisco – ICA! Which we pretty much waived hello to and then headed straight for Huacachina, a tourist haven nestled between sand dunes about 40 miles across and 300 feet high (that’s our guess, which could be wildly inaccurate, but just visualize sands dunes as far as the eye can see!). This city’s biggest tourist thing is four-wheeling through the dunes and sandboarding down the slopes. Amy about peed her pants just thinking of it (she’s not the most adventurous gal), but she got over herself and one fine evening we decided to check it out. Our description wouldn’t possibly capture this experience. It was SO fun and quite the adrenaline rush. Some of the drivers are crazy!! Ours, thankfully, was just the right amount of crazy to make the experience fun, but not scary. And the sand-boarding was pretty awesome, which is saying a lot since Amy strongly dislikes anything related to snowboards (bad experience at Killington, Vermont one year), but the dunes where so high that most amateurs couldn’t actually go down standing up. We all went down on our bellies. FUN!! Unfortunately, we don’t have any pictures of this, since we didn’t want to ruin our camera with sand.
At this point in our Peruvian adventure, we started to discover a little pattern with flying objects and Amy’s right eyeball. Apparently, her eyelashes appear to be a runway for flies, gnats, and other flying things to park on. At least once a day, she had some little guy fly directly at her eye. A couple of times, she closed her eye quickly and caught them in her eyelashes. This is not fun, folks! Of course Rob started laughing everytime this would happen, because it’s like all these flies went and told their friends about Amy. As you can expect, she started wearing sunglasses a lot more.
The day after sandboarding, we did a little wine tour to some nearby wineries. Southern Peru is known for its fine grape-growing climate and making the countries best wines and Pisco (a brandy liquor). Our verdict: Peru, drop the wine, stick to the Pisco!
Our last day in this area, we headed into town (Ica) to visit a museum that our Lonely Planet raved about. We like museums; we’re totally those people. This museum was pretty quaint, but totally blew our minds. The museum was robbed back in 2004 where some of the most ancient weavings were stolen. We learned that, sadly, ancient art robbery is quite a booming profession. Despite this, their collection is still pretty impressive. It is mostly of the Paracas and Nazca civilizations, which is pre-Incan, we’re talking 500 B.C.E.! The most striking thing was the last room of the museum which houses several full mummies, skulls, and even a mummified macaw (complete with feathers!). The bodies were preserved so well, that some of them still had skin and hair. The skulls were also mind-blowing. Did you know that these ancient people were obsessed with perfecting their appearance just like we are today? We like to shave ourselves, dye our hair, have plastic surgery, etc.; they liked to shape people's heads. They thought that head shape was the most beautiful and distinguished thing. The upper classes of this society practiced head deformation, where they wrapped the head and used contraptions to shape the head from the time of birth. The most common shape was elongated (think coneheads, but flat on top). We were truly speechless. We’ve never seen anything quite like it. We felt like we literally had stepped back in time with all these bodies. We weren’t able to take pictures, but we’ve posted a picture from the web to give you the idea of what we saw.
So, at this point, we were really beginning to get a glimpse of ancient Peru. Now for some REAL mysteries…the Nazca Lines!
This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar.
