Easy Eyes' Blog: Weekend cont'd

Nearly every movie with at least one scene set in a foreign country shows some exotic animal outside of its element but the animal fails to garner any attention from passers-by. I had on of those moments yesterday morning while waiting for practice to start at school. I was waiting out by the soccer field, which is right next to the athletics office and gymnasium when a goat (which I could’ve sworn was a deer, but I doubt that they have those here) came right by me just nonchalantly grazing. Shortly thereafter, I started my warm up jog and saw a full-grown falcon perched in plain view right by where I was sitting when the deer passed. The falcon left by the time I came around the second lap, but I had to look around to see if anyone else had taken notice- no one had.

I didn’t finish talking about my weekend after the Nazca Lines. We came back by 10 and had breakfast then we hung out around the hotel and pool until 1 or 1:30 to go to an oasis called Huacachina to eat and go dune bugging and sand boarding. I really wanted to go sand boarding, but wasn’t too crazy about the dune buggies. I get motion sickness pretty easily and in an attempt to limit myself to one bout of vomiting per weekend, I made the difficult decision to opt out. So a girl from my group and I walked around the samll town looking at the artisans’ work. The group wouldn’t be gone for very long so we weren’t going to be lonely. When they returned, we got back on the bus to go to Ica to eat and spend the night. The hotel we went to was really nice, but pretty far from restaurants and the city. So after having a stupid argument over which method would be safest, we decided to get back on our big tourist bus and have the driver take us into the city. So there we were pulling into a small, crowded town in all our American tourist glory. Some (about half) were pretty pissed that we always are being baby-sat while travelling (there was even a guy who worked at the hotel who decided to accompany us to make sure we were safe). The restaurant we went to was called The Venicia and the food was incredible so it ended up being all worth the headache.

We had to get up really early again the next day to go on a tour of the Ballesta Islands. We got on the little boat around 8:30 or 9 and started the really cool tour. The boat held about 25 people so it was only our group on it. The water was beautiful and the weather was nice. The islands are filled with birds and bats. Guano (bat poo) is a really important export of the islands (they are used on farms for fertilizer) so they reeked really badly, but the sight of the penguins and sea lions made up for the bad smell.

After the tour, we went to this town called Chincha to visit an hacienda (kinda like a Southern plantation). This area has a large Black population due to the fact that this is where all the slaveholders had their farms. Slavery isn’t allowed any more, but there still remains all the farms and they are worked upon by the townspeople (for money now). Interestingly, Chincha is the only place in Peru that can boast a 0% unemployment rate. The hacienda was beautiful and had these really awesome catacombs that we navigated through with candles. After the tour, we had a great lunch and were treated to a performance by local musicians.

Here are all the photos:
Boat: